When it comes together

I feel left out sometimes when my friends are discussing their favorite bands and their favorite childhood TV shows and stories. “I am foreign,” I would respond with a smile, shrugging my shoulders, “never heard of them before.” Then the conversation moves along its original path, with me stopping in the middle of the road, eager to catch up. I would care less about those TV shows, but I can’t stand the fact that I am a mute when people start to talk about democracy, the Constitution, politics, human rights, and in general, the United States. I did some reading and research but realized that a couple nights of reading do not even come close to eighteen years of living here.
The first week of American Conversation class reaffirms my choice of enrolling in this program. I have always believed that the best way to involve in a culture is to become an expert of it, and I think I am traveling towards the right direction. On Monday we talked about FDR’s speech on Four Freedoms and its relations between Rockwell’s posters. I had never thought about freedom until last weekend when I read the speech. I had never felt that my freedom was in jeopardize, or that I ad never really thought about what freedom I did have and what I did not. Freedom is not doing whatever you want to do with no boundaries or limitations. Freedom is a complex concept. It has different meanings for different people. For some, freedom could be the freedom of choosing a spouse. For others, it might be the freedom of getting education. For the rest, freedom stands for speaking their mind freely. There aren’t any rankings of freedom: no one specific freedom is considered to be better than the other. Freedom comes in need of the person who is using it, and everyone should have any freedom no matter his or her nationality, gender, race, and social class; therefore we are creating a greater good of the society. Just like T.T Williams mentioned in The Open Space of Democracy, we should all work together to dissolve of polarization and divergence of the community and figure out how to solve the problems of the environment that currently threatening our democracy. This is definitely a positive freedom: it requires all of our self-determination, self-realization, and an active and logical mind, to achieve this greater goal.