Freedom Means The Right to Make Bad Choices
WASHINGTON - ELIAN GONZALEZ
We begin with Charlie Davenport. He was a Mississippi slave who, after the Civil War, was given his freedom. Charlie gave it back.
Freedom was tempting, he said. He thought it "powerful nice" that you might "go fishing whensoever the notion strikes you" and "court gals just as late as you please."
The problem, Charlie said, was that freedom also meant you had to do for yourself, handle your own affairs. He found that a daunting idea, so he made up his mind to stay right where he was.
These days, we'd say Charlie was a victim of conditioning. We'd understand that, having known nothing in life save servitude, he was ill-prepared for -- maybe even fearful of -- freedom.
So here's my question: If it were up to you, what would you do with Charlie? Knowing that he was an adult and otherwise sound of mind, would you respect his right to make what you knew to be the wrong choice? Or would you impose on him the right choice, regardless of his feelings?
Juan Miguel Gonzalez, father of Elian, is not in the same situation that Charlie Davenport was. Yet his story comes down to essentially the same question: Would you force this man to be free?
SOME observers have suggested that Gonzalez is nothing more than a Castro puppet, mouthing the dictator's words and doing his will for fear of reprisals. That's a real possibility.
But maybe Juan Miguel is speaking his mind. Maybe, having been born and raised under a dictatorship, he's much like Charlie, a victim of lifelong conditioning, ill-prepared for -- even fearful of -- freedom.
If he is, would we deny that he has the right to make that choice -- for himself and for his minor son? Would we be justified in forcing one or the other to be free?
The answer is no.
You give freedom, you don't impose it. To impose it is to defeat the purpose. Because if being free means anything, it means you are allowed the widest possible latitude to make decisions -- even bad ones -- about your own life and the lives of your children. So if parents want to raise their children as, say, members of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nation of Islam, we acknowledge that the choice is lamentable. We also acknowledge that we have no legal basis to interfere.
In America, you have a right to be wrong.
Yet, in the four months since his son was fished from the sea, Juan Miguel Gonzalez's Miami family has denied that right to him. No, that wasn't the intent. They sought to love and cheer a boy who had suffered as no child ever should.
Yet if the intent wasn't to deny Gonzalez his parental rights, that was the effect. Elian has been cocooned in a sunshine and cotton-candy dream of Disney World, new toys, birthday parties and puppy dogs.
He has lived what amounts to a never-ending trip to grandma's house, where cookies are plentiful, it's OK to climb on the couch and everyone exists only to adore you.
Is it any wonder the boy says he doesn't want to go home?
For all of their complaints that Castro wants to indoctrinate the child into the morally bankrupt ideology of communism, Elian's Miami kin have inadvertently been guilty of an indoctrination of their own.
He has been taught the crassest, most plastic of American values, the idea that material plenty equals moral virtue. Like it's a great country because we have Toys 'R' Us.
But the greatness of this country is not solely, or even primarily, about what you can buy here.
It has more to do with reserving to an individual the freedom to choose his own path.
Charlie Davenport might understand that. Because in the end, no one forced him to be free. Instead, he was allowed to make a decision about his own life -- a poor one, to be sure -- and have it honored. That, paradoxically, "is" freedom.
And Juan Miguel Gonzalez deserves no less.
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OPINION LETTER
By:
Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Copyright:
The Miami Herald
