…the ability to make decisions, to move from job to job, to utter one’s beliefs, without fear of losing access to the necessities of life as a result.

Back in the ’90s I had a co-worker with a partially controlled but ultimately incurable medical condition. It was not dangerous — so long as it was monitored and he continued to get medication for it.

He hated where he worked. He would have loved to find another job. But changing employers would have jeapordized his insurance, and therefore, his life.

He had the same “choice” someone has when they are robbed at gunpoint. “Your _____ or your life.” The fact that it was employers and insurance companies rather than the government offering him this “choice” did not make him any less a prisoner.

There’s a common myth that restrictions on freedom can only be imposed by government. People forget that the Hayes Code, which so effectively censored American movies throughout much of the 20th century, was created and enforced by film studios — not the government. The Hollywood Blacklist was an industry, not a government creation. Hell, American slavery itself was less a government institution than something the government simply allowed in certain parts of the country.

To restrict freedom, all that powerful organizations, or even just mobs, have to do is up the ante to the point where the choice is between compliance or ruin.

It doesn’t have to be immediately life-threatening to be effective. Are you working a badly paid job that allows you no time to train for another job, no margin to set aside any savings? Quitting means betting you can find another, better-paying job before you end up on the street. So you stay. Have you striven to build a career over the years, through hard work and sacrifice? Utter the “wrong” opinion and you could lose it all, end up pumping gas or driving a truck instead of teaching, or acting, or directing, or writing. (The current euphemism for this is “consequences.”) So you remain silent, even lie when asked what you believe. Because you could lose too much if you didn’t.

And no, I don’t care what opinions are being expressed. Here’s a truth a lot people don’t want to hear — The umbrella that protects some right wing idiot’s right to say the bigoted things they believe also protects my right, as a left-leaning liberal, to say the things I believe.

Take that protection from them, and you take it from me and everyone else.

That is the uncomfortable, sometimes even unpalatable truth about freedom.