U. S. Government

An Excerpt from my U. S. Government class on the fundamental concept of Freedom:

In short, there is a fundamental agreement amongst most of the citizens of the United States in the importance of individual freedom. What we don’t agree upon is what that means in specific, concrete instances. Should a citizen be allowed to burn a US flag in a public place? Should a high-school student be allowed to sit down while everyone else in her public school stands up and pledges allegiance to the flag? Should a seventeen-year-old be free to send and receive pornographic materials over the Internet? As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

And speaking of details, I find it appropriate to state here that our country started out with a large segment of our population in slavery. There wasn’t much freedom for them. Even after slavery was officially abolished, real economic and political freedom for much of our black population remained an unfulfilled promise until the last generation. Even now, the prejudices that we’ve inherited from our past have not been totally eliminated.

It is also appropriate to mention that the original native population of the United States was not given much freedom. Most were killed or herded onto reservations.

Finally, women were not afforded real economic or political freedom in most of the United States until the twentieth century.

Wow…..I don’t see any mention of the “whites” taking land from the Mexicans…..weird.