We all know that freedom is not free. The cost in human effort, human life, human suffering, is extraordinarily great, and the trek has been extraordinarily long, actually since the first ‘self aware’ hominids. It all comes down to protecting diversity while in our own genetic makeup (and epigenetic reinforcement), knowing and loving self and like creatures, at the expense of all others, was necessary for survival of the species.

The beginning of the dilemma is that by allowing the presence of diversity we protect ourselves, by repressing, enslaving, gagging, and eliminating diversity, we allow the process of elimination of any group.  The paradox goes even to the University where I work(ed). In 50 years I have watched the silent elimination of diversity in teaching styles, and attitudes, these mostly being trimmed from us by administrators who seem to be pushing the University into a Big Business mode and profit….a total corollary with who now holds the office of president of the US….  confine, reduce, suppress, revert, ignore, disbelieve, disable, criticize, ignore facts. So I saw this happen insidiously a long time ago, when the then director of toxicology came to my office and said… “you must use Word for word processing” on his left was a newly hired “secretary” of course now not called that.  I just said, George, I prefer to use Word Perfect, it is a better program for me, and i can export my document to Word so you can read them.  He became flushed and said that was not good enough.  My retort was “you mean you are telling me, in this university, what kind of pencil i can use”….  So mandates went into existence anyway. While that was a tiny infraction on my freedom, many similar choices have disappeared.  One that comes to mind and is a particularly offensive (to me) reduction in my freedom of expression is that I there is total control over webpages from UCIT.  There should be self control in what one puts on a webpage, I am not interested in a negative or shameful site, but when I write a food blog or newsletter for cancer prevention for young girls and women, I don’t feel that it is appropriate for UCIT to tell me to make the page in red and black with a “swoosh” to comply with their branding.  Inappropriate, and control that is just beyond sensible.

That they read my page, this is fine, that they comment, this is fine, that they control the colors, the words, the style of outreach, nope. From pencils to colors and topics.  what next.