Free* Lunch

Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.

   —Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense, 2003.

Where do I write to get a new word in the dictionary?  Actually, this word isn't new at all. Ever since I was little, I've seen it everywhere. It's a very common word.  And yet I've never seen it in any dictionary.

You guessed it.  It's free*.

Don’t go to the bottom of the page looking for the note accompanying the asterisk.  The asterisk, in this case, is part of the word.  It adds the following meaning:  Certain Conditions Apply.  Next time you're at the supermrket, check it out.  I think you'll agree, it's a common word.  

Free and freedom are without a doubt among the most important words in our culture and our language.  Every decent philosopher has expounded at length on what it means to be free. Freedom is fundamental to our self-image as Canadians.  

We have, in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, several fundamental freedoms. Eight actually: conscience, religion, thought, belief, expression, press, peaceful assembly and association. All of these are subject to Section 1 of the Charter:

"...subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

That's Section ONE folks, not subparagraph 34(17)(f)(vii).  Section 1.  Right there at the start.  It may as well read:  "Apply asterisk to word free." 

Or perhaps it can be illustrated more colloquially by the following Americanism:  Freedom ain't free. Mathematically this could be represented as:

Free* ≠ Free.

The old saw says, that you can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theatre.  (What if a play has a line where the actor must yell "Fire"?  OK, now I'm just being deliberately argumentative).  And so we have Free*dom of speech.  And Free*dom of religion, and Free*dom of Expression.

And although there's no such thing as a free lunch, you can get a free* lunch just about anywhere.  You just have to listen to the spiel about the timeshare in Hawaii.

I'm not disparaging the idea.  Freedoms can't be absolute in law, in reality.  Nature abhors absolutes the same way she abhors vacuums. I shudder to think what a perfectly free state would look like, although unintentional comedian Donald Rumsfeld hinted at such  at the height of the Iraq Debacle, in his quote at the top of today's post.

Although Mr. Rumsfeld was ridiculed for his statement, he was in fact quite correct.  Free people are indeed free to commit crimes. Free* people are not free to commit crimes. 

All I can say is that I’m glad we live in a free* country.