Is the day past?

How to define freedom?

Is it the ability to go where you want to?
Is it the ability to speak your mind?
Is it to quit your job when you are sick of it?
Is it to vote the candidate that you like best or the political programme that suits you best?
When it comes to definitions like this I guess I am not enough of a philosopher to be able to grasp the big picture.
Typing FREEDOM into an online dictionary gave me this definition.
Aristotle said that a human being is free if no outside force keeps him or her from doing what he or she wants to do.


Immanuel Kant said that freedom is the human beings ability to categorise all arbitrary actions under reasonable motivations. Surely Kant's definition has to be seen as a product of the enlightenment.
The Catholic Church defined freedom to be the choice between good and evil. Only those who serve God and do good are able to be really free. To do evil means to abuse freedom and becoming a slave of sin.


Contrary to philosophers the church says that freedom does not mean that you are allowed to say and do everything just like you please to. There is a higher good than freedom which is love and if you distance yourself from love you will tie yourself to the chains of egoism and through this you will tear the band of brotherhood and revolt against god.
I suppose that in today's world this sounds more like the church's method to make people obey to the 10 Commandments. What is said after that though could survive nowadays and even be transferred metaphorically to politics. The Catholic Church believes that the biggest danger to freedom is the human being itself. With a wrong interpretation of autonomy human beings can be misguided to believe in a wrong definition of independence. This can lead to a selfish satisfaction of desires that is generated by power, a search for pleasure or prestigious.It is important to distinguish freedom from depraved arbitrariness. Freedom is always related to self-commitment and self-control.

On August 28th 1963 Martin Luther King held his famous speech inspired by the oppression of dark-skinned human beings by white human beings about freedom and equality. He stretches the fact that humans are their biggest antagonist when it comes to equality and freedom.

I listened to it and what grasped my intention most in his over all powerful speech was the final passage where he repetitively says: "Let freedom ring"
To find interesting quotes of Martin Luther King in relation to this article click here

Even though I hadn't connected this line to him, I knew I had heard this before. I searched through my albums and found a song called "Frei sein" translated "being free" written by Sabrina Setlur and sung by Xavier Naidoo.


Special service by me: translation of the text:


Once I searched for it to embed the Youtube link on this page I gave it a go and typed in "Let freedom ring" in and the page came up with a couple of song which include this line.







And then I found a video that linked what I had been searching for in the first place Mr. Obama and a voice-over of Martin Luther King:



If King had seen the outcome of the election on November the 4th I assume that he would have been a proud man, proud of the development America went through after his assassination maybe he would have even thought this outcome to be worth dying for but since he is dead we can only make assumptions.


These videos are made by voices of the public. They announce what is important to them and quote people who have inspired them. They are free to vote for whom or whatever they want and they are free to express this, no matter which cultural background they have.

I know this sounds idealised and I don't think this assumption could hold up against every scenario imaginable, but it is true if we speak of the World Wide Web as a media platform.

Today and with the American election being only a month ago political freedom and equality are a current topic again.

On Youtube and in chat rooms people can exchange their opinions freely unlike the days when Martin Luther King was fighting for equality. Every citizen with the ambition - and the skills and education I have to say - can take over a leading role in politics no matter which ethnic routes he or she might have. I would be blue eyed to believe that such things as racism do not exist anymore, but they are not as predominant as they used to be.

To exclude or judge someone because of their ethnical background is politically incorrect.

But because we are free and free to have our own opinion there are not only positive voices to be heard about Obama.

To give this story a moral as we are used to by fairytales I think there is no definition of freedom that is able to grasp the big picture as every human being has its own believes and opinions to act upon. Maybe not even Aristotle or Kant would have been able to define freedom in this modern world. When it comes to me I feel free to collect this information and post it to my blog because I think it is important to remind people that it is important to try and understand that there are more layers to politics than the credit crunch and for any German who reads this blog if a politician dies his sideburns (tribute to Gerhard Schröder)

To leave you with one more thought triggering item please have a look at "A New Song" by Langston Hughes written in 1938 on this blog that I follow.


More poems related by Langston Hughes

Picture were taken of http://www.flickr.com/photos/teresa-stanton/2418288543/

and http://www.flickr.com/photos/11304375@N07/2769553173/

More intersting links:

http://www.obamapedia.org/page/Barack+Obama
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,588190,00.html