Word: unfreedom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tradition of viewing freedom as a value. Alexander Yakovlev, who was a top adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet President, once put it this way: "We're not just trying to establish a reformed system. We're trying to dismantle the 1,000-year-old Russian paradigm of unfreedom." Trying--and perhaps failing once more. The words Ivan Turgenev wrote in The Dream more than a century ago, some years after Alexander II's decision to free the serfs, could apply today: "And once again after years I traverse your roads, And once again I find you, the same...
...seem to have a cynical paradox at the heart of our political culture: "Freedom" is our official national rallying cry, but unfreedom is, for many people, the price of economic survival. At best this is deeply confusing. In school we're taught that liberty is more precious than life itself--then we're expected to go out and sell that liberty, in eight-hour chunks, in exchange for a livelihood. But if you'd sell your freedom of speech for a few dollars an hour, what else would you sell? Think where we'd be now, as a nation...
When employers have rights and employees don't, democracy itself is at risk. It isn't easy to spend the day in a state of servile subjugation and then emerge, at 5 p.m., as Mr. or Ms. Citizen-Activist. Unfreedom undermines the critical spirit, and suck-ups make lousy citizens...
...Jews were ruled throughout the West by Rome, the Seder was a meal based on the feasts of the ruling aristocracy--a forceful, concrete expression of a lust for freedom. Drinking the wine of joy and tasting the bitter herbs of slavery, we experience both the freedom and the unfreedom around us. Most importantly, we repeat aloud our dedication to furthering the struggle...