Bow, Quiver and Arrows

How much do you value the freedom of movement? In the area of the world where I grew up, a group of individuals operated a "ring" of illegal business activities, including automobile theft (in order to take the stolen vehicles apart and sell "original" equipment for smash repairs), and tobacco and alcohol packaging, distribution and sales. Some of the people involved in these businesses also bought and sold illegal drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and prescription medicines. A few made their own distilled alcohol (moonshine or poitín (poteen)). I went to secondary school with people who conducted trade with this group.

What is your definition of freedom of movement? Do you believe that a person has the right to do what s/he wants, to live anyway s/he pleases, as long as s/he does not interfere with or disrupt the lives of others?

Automobile theft clearly interferes with and disrupts the lives of the person(s) who owned, drove and/or rode in the automobiles being stolen.

What about tobacco, alcohol and drugs? Do you believe a person has the right to purchase an item, no matter what that item is, if the use of that item directly affects only that person? After all, we allow people to buy tobacco, alcohol and drugs every day, assuming those people have paid their stamp duties and other government taxes.

When I was a kid, my father worked for the extension office of a state university. I'd visit his office and look at all the brochures created by the university to educate local farmers and business owners about practical skills. One of those skills was brewing or fermenting your own alcoholic beverages -- beer and wine. I saw those brochures in the late 1970s.

Twenty years later, I worked with a colleague, Tom Tsomczak, who had brewed his own beer. He convinced me to try the process so I bought equipment at a local beer brewing store and followed the brewing directions, combining recipes from a book I bought at a local organic food store with ones from beer brewing websites. I brewed several cases of beer and slowly drank them over the years. I have a few bottles left, including two that have sat in the back of the refrigerator since 1996 (I drank one of those bottles a year ago and it still tasted good and thick, having been made with homegrown blackberries and chocolate malt, even though there was little carbonation left, leaving one bottle in the fridge with which to celebrate something important one day (I think I drank the first bottle to finally celebrate my retirement)).

Legally, there's nothing the matter with brewing small batches of your own beer in the political zone in which I live. However, brewing too much, carrying too much across political lines or offering home-brewed beer for public sale constitutes a violation of political rules.

Thus, strictly speaking, my freedom of movement is restricted, assuming I follow the rules (which I have done, not one to participate in making, distributing and selling my own hooch).

No problem. I'm not an anarchist. I see the value in setting rules that govern conduct between humans because humans do not always conduct themselves cordially, requiring a rule enforcement group to observe other humans for known rule violations and detain the violators.

In small enough groups, we humans can agree to goals and objectives that allow us to seek individual goals while making sure the whole group survives and thrives, especially when individuals have made voluntary choices to join a group. When human populations grow into the millions and billions, though, how many rules must we have to restrict individual goals because thousands of groups and subgroups have goals that clash with one another and rules/restrictions placed on the groups are not enough to prevent the groups from interfering with and disrupting other groups, thus forcing extra restrictions at/to the individual level?

No matter where you live, you can come up with examples of your own where your freedom of movement is restricted, either obviously or subtly, depending on your current activities and groups to which you belong. You agree with some of the rules and disagree with others. You may contact your local government official to file a complaint about new rules or request the implementation of new rules. Our human society universally operates in this manner, having developed labor structures that support people who deal solely in the buying, selling and trading of rule-setting influences. We even have rules about rule-setting and rules about rules about rule-setting.

Supine in bed this afternoon, I stared at the ceiling after taking a nap. I looked at my life over the past year or so, congratulating myself on establishing the comfortable routines/regimen of writing daily, including these blog entries. Then I stepped back mentally and looked at myself as if I was a person unfamiliar with computers, who had no interest in manipulating electrical signal strength upon which all high-tech gizmos depend (wires, resistors, capacitors, filters, amplifiers, diodes, logic gates, registers, machine language, assemblers, computer programs, radios, servers, portable music players, etc., that pervade our lives), remembering the moment when I went from a high-tech geek to a management type person who valued the manipulation of people to achieve project goals over the manipulation of electronics to create a computing device.

As I woke up, I thought about the recent news of the breakup of the car theft ring and wondered where people who still lived in that part of the world would be able to buy their illegal moonshine, at one time available at almost any convenience store in or near a town called Newport (all you had to do was point at the empty glass jar on the counter and ask how much for a full one). I realized that the majority of the people working in the car theft ring were probably the same people who had dropped out of school because of illiteracy, knowing that few if any of them would have or could have read this blog.

Freedom of movement is a funny concept. I can stand in my backyard with a full quiver and strung bow, shooting arrows into a target if I want. I would probably be stopped and questioned if I set up a target on a sidewalk and shot arrows at the target, even if I had made sure the street was clear of humans, animals or other objects that flying arrows would injure. Even though I haven't shot an arrow in 20 years (probably the last time being when my former brother in-law brought his composite hunting bow to my house and we shot arrows into an old stump), I could still pick up a bow and arrow and hit a target. No literacy is required. In other words, freedom of movement and literacy are not mutually exclusive, although their paths cross occasionally.

As a literate person with many legal, well-paying job opportunities available, I doubt I'll ever work in a chop shop. I doubt an illiterate person will ever be able to program a supercomputer.

After I had fully woken up, it dawned on me that bloggers can't change the world with words, even though many of us, including me, think and act like we can. Sitting in front of a computer is not going to solve all the problems of the world if the solutions we come up with require literacy.

Therefore, while I perform my current weekly duties of getting a group of students familiar with manipulating electrical signals through the use of the Linux operating system, I must remind myself, and them, that we may thrill ourselves with our knowledge of complex computer systems but to really help ourselves and our fellow humans let's remember to keep things simple so our interactions can take place between a literate and illiterate person without requiring extra rules that'll further restrict our freedom of movement.