Reflections on Freedom and Rights

 I just finished reading Britney Spears’ book “ Woman In Me” , and it left a strong impression on me. On one hand, it is easy and engaging to read: written simply and sincerely. It was doubly interesting to me, because her rise as a world-famous singer happened during a dramatic period of my life in the USA, which I wrote about in my book Hell and Paradise. But the difficulty of my situation I explained by the fact that I was a foreigner with Russian citizenship.
Just like in the play A Streetcar Named Desire, where the main character is also a foreigner, a Polish woman, and like the French philosophers, also immigrants, Foucault and Derrida. Foucault wrote that America is “abuse, abuse, abuse.” But here we see the story of an American girl, born in the USA, whose parents were not immigrants — and yet her life is also full of this “abuse.”
Some scenes are impossible to read without tears. For example, when her ex-husband took her little children and didn’t allow her to see them for more than a year: one was only 17 months old, the other 5 months. Both the husband’s actions and the legal system’s act of taking infants away from their mother are shocking. And then, after more than a year, when she was finally allowed a one-day visit, she begged to stay with them longer, but they refused. The suffering she went through is almost impossible to comprehend without pain.
This resonated deeply with me, because much of it mirrors my own story, which I described in Hell and Paradise. Perhaps that is why I could not put the book down. But in Britney’s case, the antagonists were not only the media and authorities, but also her closest relatives.
It is hard to understand how her own father could commit her to a psychiatric hospital. At some point, one comes to the conclusion that modern American culture in many ways resembles the times of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century.
Very few people are capable of such a sincere confession as Britney made. The ending of the book evokes mixed feelings: on the one hand, immense joy that she managed to stand up for herself; on the other, disappointment that she could only do so with the help of a famous and very expensive lawyer — something most people simply cannot afford.
She writes that freedom is the ability to make mistakes, to do what you want. Yes, of course, that is true. But it seems to me that the main achievement of freedom is equal civil rights. Britney was able to reclaim them after long years of humiliation and almost sadistic treatment, but for many people this remains unattainable — simply because they cannot afford expensive lawyers.