"As actors it is our responsibility to read the newspaper, and then say what we read on TV like it's our opinion." - J. Garofolo, Team America

 

The Boy runs free. Just wait until he has a mortgage.

Freedom.

It’s more than just a slogan you see on a t-shirt, it’s also the brand name of, ahem, feminine products. Perhaps that’s what’s meant when people say that “Freedom isn’t free,” since if you took that literally, you could get arrested for shoplifting. Freedom probably costs at least $3.98.

Despite lots of press and haggling over exactly what the word freedom means, I looked upon the ultimate arbiter of all knowledge, Wikipedia, to see what freedom was. Wikipedia has two articles on freedom as an intellectual construct, both of which were very short and didn’t add much to my knowledge of what freedom is. The also had an article on a hip hop artist named Freedom Williams, who performed on a song called, “Things That Make You Go Hmmm.”

I did look up the character on Lost Enlightenment philosopher, John Locke because there was a reference to him somewhere. Despite having a really, really unfortunately long nose (his beak would have entered a room roughly six months before he did, were he on a dead run), John Locke was really, really skinny.

I’m not sure I trust skinny people with long noses (the infamous Clown Incident of 1974 led to that), so I decided to ignore anything John Locke might have said. Besides, the Wikipedia article had all sorts of words and stuff that I’d have to read, and that would seriously undermine my capability to do my favorite kind of research, which is just making stuff up.

I finally settled on the following definition of freedom: doing what you’d like to do, and not having to do stuff that someone tells you to do. Sounds similar to . . . liberty.

Good. We’ve just reached the nightmare of every parent of every two-year-old. Especially if the two-year-old is 195 pounds and six feet tall. I think most school teachers would agree that a group of six-year-olds with liberty is probably a very bad idea. It would probably be worse if the parents of the six-year-olds were crack-crazed personal injury lawyers. Worst case? The crack-crazed personal injury lawyer parents are also on the school board.

There must be something that counterbalances this whole “liberty” thing.

Hmmm.

What is the counterbalance to liberty . . . wait . . . responsibility? Responsibility might be the thing that prevents you from acting like a six-year-old with crack-crazed personal injury lawyer parents, as tempting as that sounds.

We have a Statue of Liberty, but, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a Statue of Responsibility.

Hmmm.

Nope, nowhere near Congress. Pretty sure it’s not out in California.

Where ever could it be?

Hmmm.