Freedom

I'm obsessed with freedom. Maybe it's because of my upbringing. When I turned 18, my parents treated me like an adult, completely. I was asked (since I lived in their home) of extending the courtesy of letting them know if I was coming home for the night or not; other than that, I was treated exactly like an adult.

It bothered me that I knew other 18 year olds who felt the need to ask their parents permission to do things.

Why do you need to ask your parents? You're an adult! Legally!

The curious thing was, the most frequent response had to do with money. They needed money from their parents to do something. They drove their parents car. Their parents covered their auto insurance. Their parents paid for their college.

And if, apparently, your parents were paying for you to go to college, adult or not, your parents still owned you.

Maybe just a little bit. In some cases, quite a lot.

I seem to remember some people having to live at home and have a curfew after the age of 18, all because their parents were paying for them to go to college.

Here's some insight into my life: I paid for my first car when I was 16. My parents loaned me $1,000 for the car, $200 for gas and $200 for insurance and I paid them back while maintaining my insurance and gas. I bought another car from them for $4000 my senior year and paid it back within a year or a year and a half. There was no thousands of dollars waiting for me to go to college; I got a full ride, or I didn't go.

Which is why I was annoyed when FAFSA asked about my parents income. What did that matter? I'm 18, and I pay for everything myself. It was a bit of a comedy to myself and my dad when, on a trip with a quasi-Christian group in Chicago at the age of 19, the leader felt the need to call my Dad and ask him if it was ok if I went home early. We played along.

But I was a grown man, and if I wanted to leave Chicago, I was doing so, and I didn't need my father's permission. I had my own car, my own money, and, if I really needed to, I could move out on my own.

FREEDOM!

It really does not seem too much of a stretch to me today that my generation is so ready to do the same with the government. Let the government support us in every way, give us our food, our job, our housing, our health insurance. It all sounds good.

Until the other shoe falls, and they're telling us that it's a Wednesday night and we can't go out, we have to finish our term paper first.

But to obtain my freedom, I had to be responsible enough not to go begging my parents for money. And to maintain our freedom, we, as 20 something adults, need to be equally self-sufficient. Quite frankly, that's a discipline that too few of my generation learned from our parents, or care to learn for ourselves.

We would rather have a master then do all that extra work.