FREE

It is an interesting word in the English language.  Aside from being a stand-alone word, it had, over time, doggedly percolated itself into other stand-alone words,  either as a prefix or suffix, in such words as freestyle and bornfree, for example.   More so these days in the American landscape of politics and issues affecting socio-economics.  It is an adjective, an adverb, and as verbs go it can be quite forceful, unequivocally noble, though not always easily dispensed, but admirably one moral thing to bestow on something or someone.  It can be spiritually selfless, until it gets embroiled in social debates when paired with other innocuous words to become "freeloader", "free stuff", "free college tuition", or "freebies".

free:

adjective

1.   not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes.

"I have no ambitions other than to have a happy life and be free"

2.   not or no longer confined or imprisoned.

"the researchers set the birds free"

adverb

without cost or payment.

"ladies were admitted free"

verb

release from captivity, confinement, or slavery.

"I will free you from this debt burden."

Biblically, we may find it scripturally soothing  from the New Testament's Book of John, chapter 8, verse 32, "and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 

For a long, long time throughout recorded history the word "free" stood for what it was as it related to, more precisely, the better side of humanity.  There are numerous words that contain "free" - over four dozens actually that are categorized as valid Scrabble "reference words" - as positive attributes, or at best neutral, except maybe for the word freeloader.  It had also become a prefix to a suffix, as an entirely modern word - "freebie".

Today, it may not be so clearly defined amidst the fuzziness of politics and the new social constructs going on in today's environment.  We'll get to that in a bit.

Meanwhile, "free" is something the universe disagrees with, as it does with abhorring a vacuum. Processes even between or among inanimate particles always come at a price.  When hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, energy is lost between them. Likewise, in reverse, it takes the introduction of energy to split them apart back into oxygen and hydrogen. Another example to explain it is that in nature nothing is dispensed by any living thing as totally free, without cost, to another living thing, unless the former gets something in return from the latter. It does not necessarily have to be of equal value - it seldom is - but that it must be meaningful enough to either one so that the whole exchange of favors is sustained to the point that both living entities depend on it for survival.

It is a cliche now, but it still holds true, "there is no such thing as a free lunch".  When a flower dispenses nectar at great expense of its resources and energy, it does not just freely offer it to the bee without the bee performing the chore of pollination.  This symbiotic dance had gone on for millions of years.  The sea anemone and the clownfish have the same relationship that is hard to explain at first glance but now we know why.  There are thousands upon thousands of such examples.

But today we are confronted with more than just the hijacking of the word "free".  But first, it is not free from confusion either (pun intended).  Free radicals is not a verb-phrase to advocate liberating subversives or unruly college students.  However, for the sake of a healthy disposition, physiologically or biologically speaking, it must be understood that free radicals (a noun phrase) are toxic free-wheeling chemicals that can damage our cells. 

Meanwhile, the free press - now a relic connotation for a newspaper -  is now called the media - and from the looks of it "free" has actually sold out to advocating for a political agenda or social transformation.  Free speech is only free as a monochromatic description of a one-sided opinion, where one opposing side may not be allowed to express, often violently muzzled by rabid demonstration from a mob on the streets or college campuses.  Now, many college students, addled by ideas absorbed via lectured osmosis from overpaid professors, have themselves become the free radicals of academia. 

"Free" has now also become a substrate, a hidden layer beneath a false facade, for social or economic justice, again attaching the word free to another as a political foil - as in free tuition, free healthcare, and eradicating the phrase "free stuff" because it is now "public goods", as proposed by a junior congresswoman.  

"Free" has now become a pernicious word to the hardworking taxpayers on one hand,  and sweet nectar offered by politicians wanting to advance their version of social justice.  "Free" has become like sugar, or sugared water, high-calorie enticement with very little nutritional value as a social and economic remedy to the needy.

Giving away "freebies" is not a social solution.  It is a poor substitute for an economic incentive.  More precisely, it often disincentivizes work or desire to contribute a fair share of the labor. The country was founded by those who expected that only from labor and hard work  will anyone get rewarded with the fruit of their toil. Free meant only that the power to acquire anything can only be had from the personal investment of one's labor. Below is a direct quote from the same congresswoman: 

“These are public goods. They’re public goods. So I never want to hear the word or the term ‘free stuff’ ever again ... because I’m tired of already hearing some of these neoliberal folks who are trying to like flip the script on us”. 

Merely changing the label does not make it a sound policy.

The so called "public goods" do not just magically appear so she or the kind of government she envisions can distribute them like pixie dust.  Taxpayers put it there but not so they can be given freely as an entitlement to just about anyone who will lay claim to it.  Though the average taxpayer may begrudgingly pay excessive taxation, he or she in the end freely pays what is due, but clearly the revenue must not be just given freely without scrutiny.  By labeling it "public goods" the congresswoman and her squad believe it is free to anyone who wants them. And it is human nature to "want" once anything free is out there for the taking.

There is now this clamor for income equality.  It often leads to the false belief that equal sharing of wealth is now a justified objective.  These days wealth, though often mistakenly defined as having more than enough, whatever "more than enough" means, has become a questionable attribute rather than as a measure of success. Thus, it should be shared.  Why? It is never logically explained to those who have it but for those who don't, they firmly believe that they are  entitled to have some of it as a social equalizer of some dubious justification.

Here is the bottom line.  In the equation of giving and getting, there is obviously a natural limit to what the giver can give but once allowed to get, the getter almost always gravitates to a bottomless appetite to get.  That is human nature.  The welfare program is one fine example. No one can deny that there are abuses in food stamps but that is not all.

A little over five years ago a published article entitled, 

"When Welfare Pays Better than Work"

(Quote) :The federal government funds 126 separate programs targeted towards low-income people, 72 of which provide either cash or in-kind benefits to individuals. (The rest fund community-wide programs for low-income neighborhoods, with no direct benefits to individuals.) State and local governments operate more welfare programs.

During the first 150 to 175 years of this country's history none of those programs existed.  Yet the nation went on to become the modern example to all other nations in terms of product development and labor to wealth expansion never seen before. The ability to acquire was an attribute predominantly ascribed to working individuals.  The successes of industrial and agricultural corporations rested on their ability to produce goods which in turn solely depended on the people's ability to purchase them.  There had to be that or else the free-market system is doomed to fail.

And that is the crux of the debate that is raging today.  The free market system is under a growing barrage from those advocating that much should be given free to those in need.  But as mentioned above, need could easily become that bottomless abyss to which the givers of "free stuff" or what is now suddenly called "public goods" may one day find that there is no more to give.  And all because of this once noble word used to be known simply as FREE.

But there is time to address and perchance to make a course correction, and timing is of the essence.  Speaking of "Timing", the previous musing just before this one is worth a look.


Timing: a particular point or period of time when something happens.

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2019/12/timing.html

Timing

Definition : (a) choice, judgment, or control of when something should be done.

(b) a particular point or period of time when something happens.

Timing is everything.  Or, so we're told.  That is what we know.   Or, that is all there ever is. That is all there ever will be.  

From the second definition above, (b) "a particular point" is that intersection in the fabric of space and time where and when something happens, one event at a time.   But is there some cosmic gear system that regulates all that have and are about to happen?  Or, are we to believe that everything is and should be left to chance?  Or, are these questions best left alone?  We will try to get to that.  But first ...  

Ever wondered about this scenario:  You were already in your car, about to start the engine, when, as an afterthought you wanted a bottled water, so you decided to get out, got back inside the house, and got one.  That ever so slightly changed everything.  You were a tad late reaching that first intersection outside your subdivision, just seconds before another driver ran a red light and hit the car in front of you in a fiery crash.  That could have been your car the driver hit had you not decided to get one bottled water.  Timing was everything.  Well, you'll say, "it was what it was".   As most of you will probably say, timing was everything.  We'll have to set aside for the moment what or how it was for the car that was hit.  Or, for that matter the driver who ran the red light.

A U.S. army lieutenant, commanding an outpost in Afghanistan over a decade ago, ordered his men to fire at three civilians in motorcycles approaching their checkpoint, not slowing down when signaled to stop.  Earlier that day several U.S. servicemen were ambushed by "civilians" in motorcycles in another area nearby.  The lieutenant was court marshalled, convicted and sentenced to prison for ordering his men to fire at unarmed civilians.

The lieutenant, responsible for protecting himself and his men, had seconds to make that fateful decision. He had been in prison for ten years until he was pardoned by the president.  The thing though is that recently, through advances in technology, evidence now showed that there were traces of IED (Improvised explosive device) on the body and clothing of the "civilians" - based on evidence that were kept for DNA analysis. Had the technology been around then, the soldier's life could have taken a different direction. The time the lieutenant had to make a decision - seconds - took ten years of his life and away from his family.

Today, clocks and modern replay technology has changed the world of sports.  What has not changed is the "choice, judgment, or control of when something should be done" that athletes face.

When the quarterback throws that 50-yard pass, both he and the receiver are at the mercy of timing.  A millisecond too late or too soon for the receiver to look up, jump and reach for that ball travelling at between 40 and 50 miles per hour will determine if it is a catch or a miss.  

A baseball thrown in major league takes only 0.4 seconds to travel from the pitcher's hand to home plate. A baseball hitter has four tenths of a second to decide at swinging or holding off on the bat.  Brief moments before that, the hitter's brain is making quick assessments as to whether to expect the pitch to be a curveball, a change up, a slider or a fastball and whether it will be over the plate in the strike zone. In less than half a second, the entire exercise of anticipating, deciding and swinging the bat or not, is over. That's why they are paid the big bucks. If they hit on average 1 in 4 times to get on base (batting 0.250), they're a major league player.  1 in 3 and they are a star.  If they hit 50 or more homeruns in one season, they are superstars.  Sounds awesome but remember, on average a healthy starting player may get to bat about 500 times in a season.  In other words doing something spectacular only 10% of the time is all it takes to get paid a lot of money.  Do that as a heart surgeon, or as an engineer or accountant, and not only will you lose your license, you may never practice your craft ever again. 

Timing is all there is in a constantly moving and changing world.  Of course, we are never always thinking about timing as a critical part of our lives.  We go on about our day not always aware about timing in a hyper-conscious way as a baseball hitter or football receiver does. But timing is there everyday.  The second mouse to happen upon a mouse trap already sprung by the earlier mouse gets the cheese*. (* In reality, the second mouse and any other rodent may not come anywhere close to the trap with a dead mouse or the cheese at that point).  We joke about what it is to be early if you were an early worm. That trait to be early was so beneficial and laudable for the "early bird" but obviously not so for the early worm.

The greatest timing phenomenon ever to come across in our entire history occurred just over 60 million years ago. What occurred at that one fateful moment, and with that magnitude of that event, has never happened again, at least not yet. The reason we are here today, our very existence, we owe to that single event.  It happened at a particular point and period of time.   

An asteroid the size of Mt. Everest hit earth in what we now call the Yucatan Peninsula and a good chunk of the Gulf of Mexico.  Early in the history of our solar system the likes of such an event happened constantly as the early planets were all trying to get everything together in perpetual motion, as they still do today, constantly moving, picking up debris of asteroids,  rocks and swirling  dusts until much had settled a billion times less chaotically.  It probably took two billion years.  Fast forward to a few more million years and life emerged. A few more and the dinosaurs ruled the entire earth for 160 million years.  The mammals that were around were tiny creatures, fist-size, scurrying around, finding a niche for survival. 

Then the asteroid hit.  That wiped out most of the giant dinosaurs at first impact and the subsequent fires and heat.  Global cooling followed as cloud cover blocked out the sun for hundreds of years.  That sealed the fate of the giants.  Smaller species survived but more importantly the age of mammals begun.  That took millions of years.  Today, we are the dominant species.

Since no other asteroid that size ever hit again, the timing of that last one was one fortuitous event for humanity and all the living things we see today.  By the way, not all the dinosaurs perished.  They're still with us - we know them today as birds - from hummingbirds and sparrows to turkeys and ostriches.

Let's go back to that one moment sixty -seven million years ago.  Had that asteroid been just a handful of moments late or if it came by just moments earlier it would not have crossed path with earth, both traveling at tremendous speeds, and today our story or the story of earth will have unfurled a lot more differently.  But then if we go back much earlier than that, if earth as a planet forming along with the others, was not positioned at a particular orbit that is now what we call the Goldilocks zone - not too hot, not too cold - we will not be here.

So, we are here today, pondering the age-old question. 

Do we have the reason  why we are here, or do we even need to reason why?  Call it the universal gear system.  Call it fate.  Call it luck.  Call it whatever you want.  We cannot ignore the fact that along with whatever label you want to use for a reason, or none at all but pure coincidence,  there is something beyond our ability to completely understand.  Why the limit to our capacity to comprehend is itself an even more critical question.

This reminds me of another thought experiment I heard a while back. Imagine characters on a comic strip - living in a 2-dimensional world - pondering if there is a world outside of their flat world.  The comic strip artist, their creator lives in a 3-dimensional world with pen and pencil designing and creating the characters that are on a flat sheet. Don't think of that as totally absurd.  Remember the fish swimming below the water line lives in a 3-dimensional world.  Witnessing another fish nearby that swallowed a worm (attached to a hook and line) suddenly disappear from their watery world, the fish will have to wonder, "What happened, where did it go?"  It will have no way of knowing.  It does not have the ability to understand.

We are the characters in the limited 2-dimensional world, or we could be the fishes in the 3-dimensional water world, wondering but clearly limited as to what we can conceivably understand.  But we know enough, we have enough capacity to be awed by all that we see.  

We have the amazing feat not to just ask and wonder.  More than that we have the capacity to appreciate the beauty of colors, or just simply to ascribe beauty to everything we see around us.  We are moved emotionally by mere words and that we are also touched by a string of sounds.  Sounds organized into a symphony, or Schubert's sonata, or Chopin's Nocturnes, Mozart's violins or oboes wafting above a field of many other symphonic musical notes.  Those will have to tell you there is Something, there is Somebody above our limited dimensional world well beyond our capacity to understand, operating or directing the universal gear system.  We will just have to acknowledge that given our ability to ask or wonder or to ponder these things is enough as an additional reward on top of  being alive.  

There is enough there to measure or conclude that we are likely inhabiting a world beyond merely just existing. Perhaps someday we will find out why and how.