Freedom And Responsibility

As a young freedom loving teenager trying to push the boundaries in a boarding school I was constantly told by tough but very caring nuns, “One’s own freedom ends where another person’s freedom begins”.

My freedom obsessed teenage brain did not understand the aphorism and only when I became a parent did I finally begin to understand.

I was free to work, express myself, had the power to choose, but I was not free because I was responsible for a little baby who had the freedom to do with me whatever he wanted. To add insult to injury that little lad showed no responsibility on either end.

Simultaneously I fancied myself a free writer and expressed myself with aplomb until I made (in retrospect) the biggest mistake of my life.

I broke the story of a young woman who was murdered in her home while her husband was at work and her son at school.

At the time I exercised my freedom to write very seriously and went after the story to get all the facts…I did get them all…the whole story, front page headline news, a raise, freedom from low pay until I got a telephone call from a young lad.

He was the son of the murdered woman. A polite young man who thanked me for helping to find his mother’s killer but…he went on, “Did you have to malign my mother so by stating all the facts…I understand you were doing your job. But don’t you see that you are now responsible for damaging me.

“I would have preferred not to know all about my mother. I will always love her but the facts you so freely printed in your newspaper, I didn’t need to know.”

Brings me back to yesterday…..the press needs more freedom, it has been said at a two-day media event. My point is: yes we should, but shouldn’t that go with responsibility?