The Issue of Freedom, Choices, and Opportunities in Three Different Stories

Freedom is something not even close to everyone has, in fact, only 45 of the 195 countries in the world, are free. In these three stories, Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass. There is always a central theme, which is, choices are a direct cause of happiness. Freedom is needed if you want happiness because living in a world where only you don’t have rights, giving someone opportunities then taking them away, and limiting someone’s choices will make them unhappy.

If you had freedom, and the next day it was taken away with no sign, you would be depressed, right? Going out having fun and living life how you want is something you cannot do if there is no opportunity to. One day you could be, as it said in Never Fall Down, “going frogging in the countryside and sometime playing war”(McCormick 10). Then later it could change into you having no freedoms, and neither does anybody else. In Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick, on page 44 it says, “I let him die. Because now I’m a ghost myself”. The way it says this is perfectly describing how they are restricting freedoms, and how it makes them not feel like people anymore. Sadly, it says, “No pain. No sound. Not even feeling like I have a body”(McCormick 56), showing how the fact that they have no rights is causing them to feel bad and why people deserve to have choices in life. Everyone knows how much better it is to have opportunities; they shape how you live life, and make you be a happy person.

A way to become unhappy in life is having someone limiting choices you are able to make. If someone were making all your decisions in life, you wouldn’t have any reason for living, you would be depressed. In Persepolis, the little girl became upset when, in 1980 it was “the year it became obligatory to wear the veil at school”, for it made her feel worthless. She, feeling as if she had no uniqueness, was sad; showing, yet again, freedom is required in being happy. There was a time where her privileges were more and more limited after that to where “another family spent weeks with them”. During the time they were staying with her, she was starting to only be allowed to make fewer decisions and she was becoming sadder. Restricting freedom and choices away is a direct way of taking happiness away as well.

Another example of when not having opportunities is making people unhappy, is when you just have none at all, although everyone else around does. If that were to happen, you would for sure be upset, and want your freedoms back, for everyone else did. In one example there was a time in Frederick Douglass’ life where he was a slave and he “succeeded in learning to read and write… though he had no regular teacher. His mistress kindly instructed him”. He was happy to learn and would do it, for he wanted to. Later in this story, he was not so happy, freedoms were again vanishing, causing him pain as he wanted his freedom. He would try “making friends of all the little white boys who he’d meet in the street. As many of these as he could, he converted into teachers”. Sadly, this is one example of what people needed to do in order to be able to learn. Giving one person no freedom whatsoever is going to cause them so much pain, as all they want is to be free, with everyone else.

Freedoms, choices, and opportunities we have in life are not shared globally; because it will make them happy, people need to fight for them. They know you need to make choices, in order to be happy. Having rights restricted, taken away completely, or limited at all is something that needs has go away, so the world can be peaceful all around. Essentially, when a freedom is restricted, your happiness is then restricted and that is restricting your world from being a happy place.