One of President Bush’s holiest of holies seems to be the word “freedom.” In his second inaugural address, he used the words “free,” “freedom” and “liberty” 49 times. (The word occurs in one of Bush’s most amazing assertions, when he observes of our “enemy” that “he hates freedom.”) But what “freedom” means is not self-evident. Columbia Professor Eric Foner, author of “The Story of American Freedom,” points out that for many, throughout American history, “freedom” has meant not only such things as freedom of choice in personal matters, but the guarantee of each person’s Social Security, and a commitment “to achieve justice for those long denied genuine equality.”

The Bush budget currently under consideration by the Congress includes significant cuts in such areas as medical care for the disabled and help in paying large heating oil bills. Like Social Security privatization, perhaps the most important issue now facing the American people, such movement, away from public commitments of help where it is most needed by those who can least afford it, weakens our social bonds and does great damage to freedom. Citizens cannot exercise significant personal freedom without basic Social Securities. And we are all damaged as citizens when we as a society withdraw such commitments.

In an op-ed piece a few weeks ago in the Bangor Daily News, author and political science professor Benjamin Barber laid out the case against Social Security privatization. Barber’s argument did not deal with questions of costs or efficiencies – whether such a move would “solve” purported financial problems in the system. Rather, Barber is concerned with the negative effects of such privatization on our society, on the community of which we are all a part: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract.

It dissolves the bonds that tie us together.”

Those “bonds” are what we weave together into what can be called the social fabric. Since its institution in the 1930s, Social Security has basically been, as Barber put it, a promise: “to give every working family a guarantee of support at retirement, or in case of disability or death.”

That promise seeks to ensure what the very name of the program suggests – Social Security, rather than merely individual security. As part of the concerted conservative attack on the values Barber and Putnam defend, the word “entitlement” has taken on a negative, pejorative connotation. Yet it is as something to which we are entitled that Social Security – what those words mean, not only the program that bears that name – lies at the heart of our commonwealth.

As a society we have chosen to provide Social Security because to do so is to do what’s right. We invest in Social Security or Medicare not as consumers but as citizens. Issues involving citizenship go beyond matters of dollars alone. As Barber put it, “Dollars don’t deliberate. They don’t seek common ground. They are not bearers of empathy and imagination.” Our tax-supported social and educational programs are increasingly under the gun in the light of vast expenditures on “defense,” and unthinkably immense deficits, due largely to a war of dubious provenance and tax cuts mainly of benefit to the wealthy.

Social Security represents a commitment to justice and a recognition that as a people joined together and taking actions publicly, as manifested in what we call “government,” is one of the most important ways in which we work to achieve and maintain such justice. It is a difficult – and costly – endeavor to take care of each other and not just of ourselves. It is made doubly hard when “government spending,” what we call “government” itself, are almost automatically viewed as bad things, obstacles and hindrances to what is assumed alone to matter – individual achievements and satisfactions.

It may give most of us a surge of pleasure, as heavily burdened taxpayers, when we read of a pundit’s smug assertion that our goal should be to reduce government to a small enough size to where we could drown it in the bathtub. But the consequences of such a withering of commitment to the common good would be a disaster which most would not really welcome. The “war of all against all” may sound exciting, but our happiness comes not with war but with social peace, Social Security. Only with them does “freedom” mean anything.

Along with Social Security “privatization” (taking money now raised by FICA taxes and giving it to individuals on the stipulation that they then use it to play the stock market), another cornerstone of President Bush’s program is continued tax cuts. The resulting impoverishment of resources would affect us all, weakening the ties that bind. Our social capital is a precious resource – one that is still relatively robust in Maine, as indicated by measurements of our “quality of life” and other indicators of social health. But our freedoms cannot thrive if we are convinced to withdraw material support for our efforts as a people to nurture the common good.

Mahatma Gandhi may have overstated the case when he observed that “there can be no happiness for any of us until happiness is won for all of us.” But he was telling us something very important that we ignore at our peril.

David Gross, a resident of Bangor, is a retired University of Oklahoma professor of English and a 1960 graduate of Orono High School.