Still free, eight years later

"They can take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom." - William Wallace, in Braveheart.

You can give away your freedom by acquiescing to draconian security measures and other personal intrusions like those that have been added to our lives over the past eight years. Actually treating everyone as a potential criminal or terrorist was nothing new in the US of A; the events of Sept. 11, 2001, merely provided an excuse to accelerate the process.

I always found it ironic that these anti-liberty measures were enthusiastically implemented by those who, with a straight face, said the attacks were staged "because they hate our freedom." If crushing freedom was the motive, the attackers succeeded to a point.

But your freedom is so hardwired into you that no one can take it from you without taking your life.

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way," Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote, memorably quoted in the opening of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. When everything else is in restraints, you can still think free.

"You can't take the sky from me." - Joss Whedon, "Ballad of Serenity."