Freedom to and freedom from: philosophical perspectives

¶ … Freedom to & "Freedom from"

All Quiet on the Orient Express - by Magnus Mills

Choice a: Comparison

The narrator initially wants the reader to believe that he really truly plans to travel "abroad East. You know, Turkey, Persia, then overland to India." Those are great and adventurous plans; but the reader sees by page 11 that the unnamed narrator really just wants something, anything to do, anything that is offered to him; and hence, he is a "slave" to whatever new menial task presents itself to him. "To tell the truth," he writes, "I wasn't really bothered..." By working for his rent and not receiving any direct financial benefits. and, lacking the ambition to seek employment and carve out a spot for himself elsewhere, he continues to trade his tent camping site for the task of painting a gate, then repainting rowboats, building a mooring, cutting wood and delivering milk. As his tasks multiply, he becomes more and more indebted to the man who serves as a kind of "slave-master," Mr. Parker; and so, the narrator is a kind of slave. He's practically an indentured servant, and yet, ironically, he does have "freedom from" the drudgery of punching a time clock and working nine-to-five and being categorized in one profession.

Paragraph 2: Transition. Find someone you know and write 4 mapping statements that explain how someone represents "freedom from."

Mapping Statement #1: The friend of the family I will discuss and describe is named "Jim." Jim is a tall, thin, high-energy man, who started out working in an automobile manufacturing plant, right after high school, and made very good money doing it. He joined the union, and he quickly realized how much money he could save by living in a sparsely-furnished apartment in the run-down side of town. Originally, Jim had mapped out a plan to save over 80% of his earnings, but he had to lower that a little bit to 75%, so he could send some money to his grandparents out-of-state. He decided to put the money into a money-market account to maximize the interest he would be paid, and his plan worked well; after two years he had saved over $35,000.

To all of his friends and former classmates and members of his family, he represented "freedom from" financial worries. With all that money in the bank, and those big checks coming in from overtime and working Saturdays, everyone he knew expected that soon he would be driving a nice car, buying a quality home in a nice suburb, finding a lady, settling down, and raising a family.

Mapping Statement #2: When Jim came back home from his job and the town he lived and worked in (85 miles away), practically nobody but his immediately family ever saw him, because he would arrive at night after his Saturday shift, and leave early Sunday afternoon. He told his parents he needed to go back early Sunday afternoon "in order to get a good night's sleep and be ready for work Monday morning."

Jim did tell his mom though that he was going to continue working six days a week, and saving as close to three quarters of his take-home pay as he could. His mom was worried about him because he would not move out of his apartment; he lived in a rough neighborhood, where drug deals were commonplace on street corners, where old cars were up on blocks in front of run-down houses with mud where lawns used to be. There was a fatal stabbing last year near his apartment, he told his mom, an old warehouse was set on fire by delinquent teen-agers, and two men were injured recently in a "drive-by" shooting a block away from his house. So his mother insisted he map out a plan to move out of that neighborhood, but not rent again, rather, put money down on a home of his own in a nicer area of town. He would then have "freedom from" the weary world of crime, drugs, violence and noisy apartment dwellers above and below him in the poor side of town.

Mapping Statement #3: Jim told his mother he had decided that he would wait until he had $100,000 saved before buying a home for himself; and at that time, he would use about $75,000 of it for a down payment, so his mortgage payment would not be too steep. His mom had also urged him to buy a better car - he was driving the same 1984 Honda civic that he bought his senior year in high school - so he wouldn't have break-downs like he was having from time-to-time. But in two more years, when he had over $70,000 saved, he began to put money in 401-K investments and abandoned his plan to buy a house. He had mapped out a new plan: when he had saved $150,000, he would buy a "fixer-upper" house, do the repairs and renovations it needed, then sell it and buy two more. He would then achieve some "freedom from" any future financial worries.