Since in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on a subject’s freedom – it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. There are a multitude of examples of un-freedom appearing in the guise of its opposite:

When we are deprived of universal healthcare, are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to choose our own healthcare provider);

When we can no longer rely upon long term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious position every couple of years, we are told that we have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover new unexpected creative potentials that lurked in our personality;

When we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed) – in education, health, travel.

Constantly bombarded by imposed ‘free choice’, forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not even properly qualified (or possess enough information about), we more and more experience our freedom as what it effectively is: a burden that deprives us of the true choice of change.

–excerpt The Courage of Hope-less-ness by Slavoj Zizek p, 24

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In retrospect this morning yesterday was a blur of road, 16 hours of driving, most of which was executed by Tobin.  I provided some respite in the afternoon.  Albuquerque to St Clair Missouri, three states is a long line drawn from south to north east.  America has a lot, a lot of wide open space.  We are not constrained spatially as are countries in Europe or as is Japan.  We have not solved the “immigrant problem” because enough of us just simply do not want to solve it.   Without immigrants, especially those desperate illegals invading us from the south — who would we have to blame for our problems, the usual problems of living in the 21st century?

I am beginning to rave.

Another day of road before us.  It’s worth it though.  The antique carousel horses are needed by future generations of children as sources of joy and hope.

At least the quotation from Zizek, taken from The Courage of Hopelessness, will be substantial words for you to think upon.