racism

One sentence that summarizes economics is, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Sure, anyone can have a lunch and not pay for it, but it still is not free. Everything costs something to someone. Even if you don’t pay for your lunch, someone will, whether it be your lunch partner, the restaurant manager, the owner, or the people who supply the raw materials to make that food. Everything acquired by a person or a community is accompanied by a price, monetary or not. Jaime Fox said, “Ain’t nothing in this world for free, and it blows my mind how many fools just don’t get that.” I agree with this statement. Many forms of literature, such as Martin Luther King’s speech “I Have a Dream” and “Learning to Read and Write” by Fredrick Douglas, have documented the high price paid for freedom and basic human rights; they show that even freedom, where the root word is “free”, has an expensive tag.

Usually, when we think of something as being free, we associate it with money. I believe Jaime Fox’s statement can be applied to so much more than “bought” materials. For many years, African Americans and other minorities have been fighting for freedom, a right that has been won with hard work, spilled blood, broken bones, and tears. This is the ultimate price tag. In Dr. King’s speech he claimed that by signing the Constitution and the Declaration of independence, the “architects of our republic wrote a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, Black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned” (447). He urges his audience, of both white and black citizens, to fight for these rights promised to all Americans. “We have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice” (448). He insists that they fight with their minds and not their force. Dr. King and all those who listened to him, who fought with him, who put their lives in danger with him, they, put the down payment on endless lease we have taken out on freedom.

Although Dr. King’s discussion of freedom has affected everyone in America personally, his address of freedom was on a larg...

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...w York (147). Nothing he gained was free, he has to fail, be beaten, learn to write, and then devise a life-threatening plan to be able to have the most basic of freedoms. During his time, it wasn’t a right, it was a privilege he was legally denied.

New generations seem to have forgotten that high costs were stapled to the back of liberty. We think that basic human rights is something that everyone should have immediately. Some believe that these rights should be imposed as early as conception. People sometimes forget that although we are now only paying “maintenance fees,” our ancestors had to buy it with the currency they had. In order for all of us to enjoy the same civil rights, people before us had to suffer without them. Like Fox said, “many fools just don’t get that.”

Today, many Americans still believe we are fighting for freedom in our country. We still fight for freedom of expression, freedom from segregation, and freedom to be who we are. Jaime Fox did say that nothing in this world is free. He was right. No one can feed a person for free because it will impose a cost on someone else. The funny thing is, that even the things that don’t cost anything to give to someone