Dear Ego, Yet another week has passed into obscurity, and it is time, once again to finish you and to send you off to the printers. Here I am again, another Sunday, sitting in front of the computer and wondering what I should be doing, and what I could be doing.

Oh well, such is life.

There is a reason I called this issue "Freedom Is...". I was going to write something about freedom of speech, and why it is so important, but I ran out of time. Instead, I shall write something here and hopefully that will cover all that I wanted to say.

Freedom is important, yet it is hard to attain. Like happiness, Freedom can only be measured once it is gone. All of us, in our society, have some freedoms that should be of total importance to us. Like the Freedom to say what you want, when you want. The freedom to hang out with the people you choose to. The freedom to spend every waking moment searching for the goals that you find important. The freedom to laugh when you should be upset, the freedom to live your life uninterrupted by others.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case around the world. Is there freedom in Bosnia? Or Rwanda? Was there freedom under Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pol Pot or McCarthy?

Our freedoms are important, that is why people take them away. A free person is a person who is not always happy, but they are at least free to make choices in their life. We have come a long way. And we haven't. Until the day comes where everyone is free to live their lives the way that they choose, we have progressed no-where. Until the day where there is no murder, rape or warfare, we have come no-where. Until the day that we all stand together, we have come nowhere.

Perhaps that day will never come. I don't know. What I do know is the day that we stop trying to create this kind of civilisation, is the day that we have lost everything that means so much to us.

There is a story about the "Golden Age", where all of humanity were joined in a bond of mutual respect and trust, where every persons freedom was realised. Perhaps that was just a myth.

Grant McDonald
Editor,
Egostrange.