Free?

“We have a full treatment center, including a lab and it’s right on the high school campus and it’s free!” That’s wonderful, I assume that it is not excessive, although it sounds like it might be, that the resources are tracked for their impact on the population served and that it is managed carefully and responsibly. That’s not my concern – it’s not free! The service is paid for by taxpayers, and unless that is acknowledged, understood and appreciated the service soon becomes a right! A couple of years ago I was teaching a class for the YMCA campaigners and one of the participants said that she had been on financial assistance for several years, but she never knew where the money came from. Now she knows and she also knows how hard it is to ask people for donations.
Freeways are certainly not free, they are paid for from in a different way than through tolls, and that is OKAY, especially I fyou have spent some time in New Jersey the home of the toll road. So many people are employed in the toll collection industry that it probably can’t be automated out of existence or phased out. The constituency is too big.
Words do matter, there is a clear and certain meaning to many words, and free is one of the most misused. We all know there is no such thing as a “Free Lunch” but we continue to hope that there might be one at least for us.