The vast majority of my life, Freedom has always been discussed as a unitary notion. It wasn't until G.W. Bush, in response to 9/11 said of the terrorists, "They hate us for our Freedoms", that I began to hear freedom referred to in the plural by both the left and the right with greater frequency.
When GW said it, I first perceived it as a grammatical faux pas - easy enough with George. But then others picked it up rapidly, and it is now thoroughly ingrained in our language.
But it bugged me then, and bugs me now, and I need help fleshing out why!
Lakoff has influenced me, and I see this as the kind of framing the left keeps falling for, but I don't believe I have the full picture. I'm hoping you can help.
Only by parsing freedom, can you begin to take freedom away. And our freedom has been eroded in at least two ways: Our right to privacy is continually violated by the NSA, military intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, and any number of other agencies in our "security apparatus" that holds a hefty, sacrosanct portion of our budget. Our right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure has been eroded by the millions of violations at our airports on a daily basis by the TSA.
Let's not be confused. Rights have always been plural. They are always debated in courts on an individual basis.
But rights are the basis of Freedom, the unitary concept of Freedom. Individual Freedom has been the cornerstone and the crucible in every court in the land for more than two centuries.
Now that Freedom has been parsed, it has been reduced to the equivalence of Rights, and they are not the same thing. Once one right has been violated, Freedom no longer rings.
Please stop referring to Freedom as a plural thing. It is but one thing: that which the cohesiveness of all our rights gives foundation to.
Call your friends on it, don't let this pluralization of Freedom wear us down any further. Freedom is unitary, and it relies upon the full Bill of Rights.
When you parse it, it's gone.
I'm sure there is more to this than I am seeing. I'm hoping you can help pinpoint what it is.