And where the hell is it hiding?
Freedom — Is It Ever Really Free?
What I learnt from the Mediums in the last little while
Mel Gibson said it could never be taken.
Then those pesky Jews took it (his driver’s licence), and he spiraled from Hollywood heartthrob to the guy saluting Donald Trump at a ‘sporting’ event celebrating toxic masculinity and legalised violence.
Is freedom really that important? Can we live without it? Will we ever live with it?
America, as I’ve been told ever since I was old enough to say Coca-colanisation, is the land of the free.
It lies at the heart of the American dream: the freedom to rise from the working poor to one day owning a gun big enough to fly to Mars.
God, that must feel incredible.
Unfortunately for me, I don’t personally know any Big Tech Deities to clarify exactly how it feels.
Bezos is busy exploiting the jungle. Musk is pigeon shit deep in his bird watching. And Coach Tony still won’t answer my calls.
The best I’ve got is Ben. He is a human. And he knows what freedom feels like.
The Americans, I’m afraid, may have forgotten.
At least Karen L. Sullivan is remembering to keep count.
When your past two presidents have been demented, and the most powerful political party in the country has rifle in its name, it’s easy to see how they could’ve forgotten that AR-15’s were not a supermarket special in the year 1791.
Michael Cappelli has something to say about that. Think it’s called freedom of speech.
Why do we keep holding out hope that politicians will wake up to themselves, their families and the innocent children being slaughtered every fucking week?
Conni Walkup Hull, eternal pragmatist, recommends you let go of that hope, and also the dream that your shaggily dressed beer drinking boyfriend will become a teetotalling Abercrombie model once you marry him.
So if the humans won’t change, what’s the solution?
Do we need new humans?
Maybe we don’t need humans at all? (Sorry Ben.)
If Frank T Bird ever builds a robot, I’d vote for it.
You know who else I’d vote for? Carlo Zeno.
Prime minister of Australia, New Zealand, President of America, CEO of Medium, whatever job he wants.
His inclinations don’t seem to include that yet, but you should read them anyway. So should our so-called leaders. They might learn a thing or two about life.
Cos if they don’t start learning now, it might soon be all too late. It only takes one crackpot dictator to blindly grope a red button and kapoosh — we are all vapouriski’d.
The only things left will be the cockroaches. Probably best to buy one now and get ahead of the curve. Unless you’re Kendra Sparkles, who writes beautifully about how she wishes she still could.
The thing is, we are all going to die someday.
For all our valiant flaps of freedom, be they the struggle against corporate oppressors, religious bigotry, or those capping our free cloud storage at 5Gb, eventually it all means shit.
Just like that mouldy jar of sauerkraut in the back of the fridge you convince yourself is ‘doing well with its fermenting,’ we’ve all got a shelf life.
One minute we’re living out every retiree’s wet dream of swimming in a bottomless pool of hot cocoa, the next minute Raine Lore is using her reverse lifesaving skills to stomp out another rival.
(Go on, admit it. I can’t be the only one hanging out to see some Grandma-on-Grandma mud-wrestling-to-the-death action.)
The great freedom about Medium is being able to write ridiculous premises like the one above and not be banned (love you Coach).
My dream, however, is to write some more ridiculous shit — but funnier, more moving and deeply intellectual — and publish it on paper.
Then for it to be banned.
And then for Miss Catherine La Grange, spinster to write a satirical piece on it.
What better publicity could there be?
I often wonder what happens to fallen stars. The ones who shunned the publicity all of us so crave.
Those whose celebrity rose to such stratospheric heights there simply wasn’t enough oxygen for them to breathe, and they hit the eject button at the peak of their powers.
I’d love to ask why, but again, I’m a little short of celebrity friends. The closest I can conjure is Bicho.
Here was a writer one boost away from the Medium 1% club. He had it all: the flair, the following, the fun.
And then he disappeared.
Was he off on a spiritual retreat, pondering the meaning of life?
Was he hunkered down with Srini, writing the next great Netflix sitcom?
Was he attempting the Guinness world record for the longest ever recorded handstand?
No. He was waiting for a robot to change his nappy.
Say what you want about the environmental destruction reaped by disposable nappy producers. To me, they mean only one thing.
Freedom.
If I want the freedom to drink fourteen red bulls during an Andrea Bocelli concert and not lose my place in the mosh pit, what do I do? Nappy.
If I want the freedom to eat the five-day-old burrito I found behind the couch as a quick snack before attending my grandma’s (mud-wrestling related death) inevitably lengthy memorial? Nappy.
If I want the freedom to lie in the bushes outside Jimmy Page’s home office for 48 hours with Paisley McClellan and her mum, waiting for him to dust off the shredder and rip through Immigrant Song one more time? Nappy.
It is in life’s simple pleasures — stalking a rock star with your mum, or joyfully shitting yourself during the tenor high C in Nessun Dorma — that we truly appreciate what freedom is.
But, just like that first microbe all those billions of years ago, who sucked down some mineral water and rode the hydrothermal vent up to the mysterious world above, we always want more.
That want for knowledge, things, pleasure, power and status makes us forget the one universal freedom we all share.
The freedom to breathe.
Let it be known that Adam Robinson does not forget.
Keep breathing, everyone.
(Except for you, Mel, you’ve probably had enough.)