The meaning of freedom

Amanda Brooks, over here, posted an interesting story back in April. Briefly she was stopped and harassed by the cops in east Texas and she felt angry and violated by it (my words not hers).

I'm not going to second guess Amanda, she clearly had a rough time and nobody deserves that. But without commenting directly on Amanda's experience I want to use it as the stepping off point to discuss freedom.

In the late 18th and early 19th century Britain convicted massive numbers of people, mainly for petty property crime, they were either hung or transported. That's how Australia got going - transported convicts. The response was disproportionate to the crime, the punishments excessive and the outcomes for the poor bastards that were convicted were awful.

The key point about British society at that time was the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots". The gap was large and the "haves" acted aggressively to ensure that there was nothing and nobody that would threaten their position. I would argue that many western countries and particularly the United States find themselves in a similar position right now. That situation is further exacerbated by the creation of wars on faceless things: the War on Drugs, The War on Terror.

The problem branches into two parts from there. The first is the thing that many of us find so confronting, so gobsmacking and so hard to stomach: the line from being one of the people protected by the law to one of the people victimised by the law is razor thin. The journey from one side to the other takes a mere breath. So as we advocate judicial murder, long imprisonment, zero tolerance, three strikes and you're out...none of us think it might be us. Yet all too easily we can slip from privilege to prejudice. It can be us and it can be us really simply and quickly.

Worse if we are poor, black, poorly educated it is more likely to be us. We are the "have nots". We don't have money, education, the right friends or political influence. If we had those things we wouldn't find ourselves in the noose and even if we did, those things would extricate us from the noose.

Circling further, the key thing that removes our personal freedoms is us - it's our fear. We are scared that somebody might bomb us, we are scared that somebody might rob us, knife us, shoot us or otherwise harm us. So we conspire with the politicians to allow increasingly punitive laws and sentencing guidelines; we conspire with politicians to send our loved ones to far off lands to die in the name of freedom; we conspire with politicians and bureaucrats to make us stand in long queues and remove our belts and shoes before we can board an aircraft, to make us leave our bottles of water at home...endlessly in a downward spiral.

Our fears mean that we allow "them" to take our freedoms from us, because until the very moment we realise that we aren't them but us, we think we are safe, we are of them and they are doing these things to make the haves safe. Of course we are a have...until just the point that we realise we are not.

As for the terrorist: his intent is to cause damage to others. The greater damage (beyond the death of the innocent) is the economic damage that we inflict on ourselves by layering "security" of every sort upon the whole population. The cost to the economy, the cost to the individual, the slowing of activity and the curtailment of sensible and reasonable activity, all in the name of security, is simply aiding those who would seek to commit terrorist atrocities upon us.

As I read Amanda's post I wondered whether that was the seat of what affected her so profoundly about this very unpleasant experience. She had suddenly, as any of us might, found herself across the line and realised that this chant of freedom is illusory.

Patriotism?

Is it because Americans are more patriotic than Australians? Is it because the military, wars and the consequent loss of life are a more pervasive part of US society?
When you trawl the blogosphere you find all sorts of examples of the respect with which everyday people in the US appear to hold military personnel. You find very little of that in Australia.
Wikipedia lists active duty personnel in the US military as numbering 1,445,000 in February this year with an additional 850,000 in Reserve elements. That's against a US population of just over 304 million for 2008 (US Census). So counting reserve and active duty the military makes up around 0.75% of the population.
For the 2007-2008 financial year trusty Wikipedia lists combined active duty and reserve for the Australian Defence Force as 73,500 and Australian population is projected at around 21.85 million in July 2009 (ABS). That gives a proportion of the population in the military of 0.34% - around half the proportion of the US.
Now that doesn't seem like much difference to me - granted Australia only has around half the proportion of defence personnel that the US does but I would have thought that the behavioural differences that I see would have been generated by a much greater disparity than that.
Maybe it's the US war dead that does it. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the total dead and wounded is about 53,500. The Australian numbers are as far as I can determine something in the order of 20-30 killed and wounded. US proportion is 0.0176% of population whilst the Australian proportion is 0.000137%. That seems to me like a real difference - 2 orders of magnitude. That's the kind of difference that would have a very real effect on how a country feels.
OK enough of the numbers, what does this really come down to? Here's my take. The US has a culture of patriotism and honouring the offices of the nation - the President for instance. They see their country as the "best country in the world". In Australia we have a larrikin disrespect or at best cynicism about our politicians. Our greatest veneration is held for the ANZACs - those poor blokes who were slaughtered through Churchill's and more generally British incompetence in 1915. We extend that feeling to the people who have died in most of the wars since.
Yet that isn't an across-the-board feeling in society - not by a long chalk. We tend to respect the "old" diggers of the first and second world wars more than wars since. We have trouble with the Vietnam war - many still believe we shouldn't have been there and find it hard to feel positive about those who served there. Vietnam tore at Australia from the inside. That in turn caused hardship for those service men and women who returned from Vietnam.
Without being negative about Australia I think it is unlikely that we would see a scene here such as that described by this blogger: Fallen Soldier
So you are the people who know. Tell me what it is that's different and why, between Australia and the US in the way we feel about our countries and those who serve in our military. Or is my view an outsiders view and do many people in the US feel indifferent or indeed negative about these things?
I don't know the answers. What I do know is that one death or wounding is one too many for the families, the friends and all those left behind, not to mention the person themselves.