Freedom? Hmm… lemme see … getting sloshed everyday, making Veishea the wettest thing ever (the Amazon rainforests should be arid deserts compared to Ames), changing girl/boy friends every week (or sooner, whichever is sooner), go to all the rock shows there are … skip school ’til the next birth and still get straight A’s…

(I can hear some people saying, “Hey!! You’re wrong there!! You missed out watching movies, checking out all the bars in town, speeding beyond the limits inside the city … and … and … stopping people from writing anything that comes to their mind!)

But seriously, isn’t that what Fourth of July was and is for most Americans, especially for students here at ISU?

I asked this 8-year-old kid what freedom meant to him and he said, “What’s that?”

I told him it’s what he was celebrating on the Fourth of July. To which he replied, “Oh, now I know! Well, it means lots of ice-cream, a whole day outside, fireworks, but I don’t like it when people give long, boring speeches.”

Out of the mouths of innocent babes, as they say, comes the truth. And I think that pretty much sums up truthfully what most people look at when Fourth of July comes along every year.

Seriously again, what exactly does it mean to the average American?

An extra day to laze, relax, go fishing, escape from self-created stress at work/school, do laundry. Maybe for some, it’s reminiscing about a war they were involved in (Vietnam? WWII?).

I was in Boston, Massachusetts, over the Fourth of July weekend this year, part of a 500,000-strong crowd on the banks of the Charles river, overlooking the Boston skyline on one side and Harvard and MIT on either bank of the river.

As I sat there through the day, these words that I came across recently came to mind. I thought they portrayed the Fourth of July “spirit,” at least of that massive crowd there:

Break Journey

Crowds throng,

seemingly among

moods joyous

and chatter raucous,

waiting to capture

all the future

if they could ever,

in this fleeting moment, forever.

Truly,

the Fourth of July

spirit

is writ

large upon lips and hearts,

upon ice-cream carts,

upon shirts,

upon skirts.

Ever so distinct

is this instinct

that longs to pause,

take a breather from the laws

of that mindless bustle called life,

and its incessant strife.

And as I watched the American dream come true (and go up in smoke) yet again, I thought of all the struggling nations around the world, whose dreams of freedom still remain dreams. For some, pursuing those dreams has even meant turning their lives into a nightmare, facing repression from their hostile rulers.

Is humanity so divided that we cannot empathize with each other wherever in the world we are? Or is it that even within this vast knitwork of social relationships, we are too busy within our individual selves to think of other people, and their sufferings and their lack of freedom?

And then I see that kid again, chasing a butterfly perilously close to the water on a riverfront, and I think: Maybe that’s what freedom is all about.

Maybe all we need to do is chase our dreams, carefree. Maybe I should stop thinking about it and get down to sloshing myself (that will be a first-time experience) and doing other mindless, mundane things in life.

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Narayan Devanathan is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Hyderbad, India.