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Heading into Christmas, I had written 20 columns for the Sentinel, roughly 20,000 words, and I had pretty much run out of my initial stock of ideas after launching this thing in July. My day job was in its peak season, I was running out of gas and I just wanted the holidays off. So, I did not write for two weeks.
By the response from some regular readers, you would have thought I had cheated them out of a 50-cent investment. “What’s up, Gary, did you get fired from the Sentinel ... where’s your column?” “Hey Gary, why wasn’t your column in the paper this week?”
My reaction was, “What do you expect for free?”
At the outset, my agreement with Sentinel management was to write a
column every other week, because having produced a regular column on
wine for some two-and-one-half years for Auburn’s daily newspaper, I
was well acquainted with the pressure and grind of writing a weekly
anything. While it may take readers barely three minutes to read this
stuff, it takes me three hours minimally to write it, plus time that
must be accounted for in thinking the stuff up and sorting it out in my
head before lighting up the laptop.
But I got caught up in the
process and routine of writing a column, so I started banging them out
every week, usually writing on Sunday morning at my Millertown Road
retreat, and then doing a little buffing on Monday morning just in
front of deadline before e-mailing to the Sentinel’s editor, Big Don
Chaddock.
The difficulty in writing this monologue is my goal is
to come up with something that will evoke a response from you,
occasionally an emotional one. My hope, my intent, is to get you to see
things from a different perspective ... mine ... and if you actually
get what I’m talking about, you might laugh—out loud—maybe even get
choked up a bit. I am absolutely delighted when you get angry. Because
if I do my job correctly, I will disrupt your day, or at least a few
moments of it, and you will think and smile and maybe, just maybe, dash
off a letter to the editor or a fuming e-mail. Or, when you see me in
the Station A Post Office, though you may be a perfect stranger, you
look me in the eyes—knowingly—and smile big.
At the end of the
day, though, what I give you is free, and I owe you nothing. So my
attitude, dear reader, is you get what you pay for. The Sentinel is a
free newspaper that you just help yourself to ... sort of like a sip
from the water fountain in Herschel Park in Old Town.
That got me to thinking about the notion of “free,” and my conclusion is it’s true—nothing, absolutely nothing—is free.
Let’s
start with “free wine tasting.” You go to a winery tasting room, step
up to the bar and you are presented gratis samples of currently
available vintages. There is no demand for payment to the winemaker—who
beams expectantly on the other side of the bar—but he has the knowledge
that you may find something you like because he has invested in “free
tastes.”
There certainly is a value to the free taste; it cost
money to vint it. As a cost of doing business, this loss in inventory
must be accounted for, and it is ultimately built into the price of the
bottle that you or someone else ultimately purchases. So, at the end of
the day, there is no such thing as a “free taste.”
Then there is
the notion of “freedom of choice,” where a woman has the right to
decide whether or not to bear her child. I will not use this as a
forum to expose my own opinion; rather it is the concept of “freedom”
that is of interest to me. While a mother may exercise her
Constitutional right to abort or deliver, the freedom of that choice
relieves the fetus of its own future freedoms. An aborted fetus is
absent all freedom, but even one delivered has the potential to suffer
untold burdens, though most often encumbrances are generally and
happily overcome by the joys of a life to live.
How about
“freedom of speech?” Now there is a double-edged sword if I’ve ever
seen one. Every one of us has the right to say pretty much whatever
one wishes—in private and in public—but how often are individuals
ostracized or marginalized because what comes out of their mouths is
not in sync with the popular dogma? And how often are we pummeled with
the drivel that floods our public airways from every crank or fool who
seeks his 15 minutes of fame? And in reality, the government can take
away our freedom of speech whenever it chooses. During both the Civil
War and World War I, the right of free speech was dramatically
curtailed in the interest of national security.
What about our
highly touted claim of being a “free” country? I have traveled around
the world and visited highly restrictive nations such as Cuba, Vietnam
and China, and though these are supposed to be totalitarian societies,
I never felt uncomfortable in any of these places because citizens
seemed to enjoy two important privileges —they could move about freely
and say pretty much whatever they wanted. Historic barriers to their
freedom seem to be crumbling rapidly.
In contrast, the freedoms
we take for granted living in America are seemingly disintegrating in
front of our eyes. We are being taxed into oblivion. Our freedom of
movement is radically curtailed because of national security issues
jamming up our airports and borders, and the staggering cost of fuel
will keep huge numbers of Americans homebound. And the human and
financial costs of maintaining our freedom by conducting ill-advised
wars in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and potentially Iran, have
become impossible for reasonable people to understand, much less bear.
So
what is free? What is freedom? Free love, free will, free-for-all,
financial freedom, freedom fighters, free fall ... buy two, get one
free. “Freedom’s just another word, for nothin’ left to lose.”
I don’t know for sure, but I do know this: You can pick this newspaper
up for free, but maybe I write a column next week, and maybe I don’t.
Gary Moffat is a journalist and he owns Carpe Vino in Old Town Auburn. He can be reached at
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