Hippies placed a premium on freedom, on the right to improvise their lives as they saw fit. And yet the 1960s and seventies also revealed the limits of freedom - how an endless array of options could be confusing, overwhelming, even debilitating.
For Lowell There are things which, said and true, are of this generation's past; of fighting freedom's battles and of taking off the mask- stories of the actions taken, to blot out the blights of sin, how heroes and the valorous fought their enemies within, Would we be traitors to our bugle, which beckons with its call? - They won freedom for their people but in fine print said: be damned.
There is a point during Tamara Stepanyan's My Armenian Phantoms when the documentary cuts to the final scene of the 1980 Soviet film, A Piece of Sky, in which the orphaned lead character, joyfully rides a horse and cart through the town that had long shunned him and the sex worker he married as social outcasts. A flock of birds are then framed gliding through the pristine blue sky above.
I don't think we'll ever reach freedom. I think that it's a thing we sometimes get closer to, and sometimes we move further away from. Some people believe that freedom is an individual matter. And they may have a lived context that allows them to believe that they are free. But something always happens that makes it clear that we are never completely free; we have moments of freedom. Freedom is a desire. Achieving it requires us to move towards it.
To be sure, addicts typically suffer impaired control. But substance misuse doesn't involve tropisms and reflexes. The addict believes, and believes correctly, that there are ways, often requiring help and support, to regain and leverage the power of self-control, and to act and be different in the future than they are now.