This is a time of year when public spaces resonate with the word of freedom. But how to get free and how to be free are very different issues, as one former prison inmate has learned. PNS associate editor Joe Loya is a California writer currently writing a memoir.

Americans' celebration of Independence Day prompts many of us to think of freedom in heroic terms. But today, like wary George Bernard Shaw, I know a harder truth about the two tragedies of life: One is not to get your heart's desire for freedom. The other is to get it.

Three years ago, on a hot July day, I was paroled from prison for the final time, after serving seven years. And there were other emancipations.

When me and my brother were 16 and 14, the police took us from an abusive home and placed us in MacClaren Hall -- a facility where children wait for a vacancy in a foster home. Children with burnt skin, black eyes, arms in slings and legs in casts, were familiar sights in that place. My ribcage was wrapped and my fractured elbow was in a cast.

At night the counselors comforted the children who sobbed and cried out, "I want to go home to my mommy and daddy." In the scary, lonely night, the anxiety of changing homes and schools and parents in one drastic swoop was a powerful uncertainty which made the sheltered children tremble and cry for the security of a bondage they were familiar with.

Those children crying to return to bondage reminded me of the wandering Israelites in the Book of Exodus who cried to God in the desert, begging to return to the onions, flesh pots, and slavery of Egypt.

Those nights at MacClaren Hall disgusted me. I felt myself stronger than the other children. But when I paroled three years ago there were several times when the desire to go rob a bank again was so strong that I finally sought counseling.

It appeared that as much as I despised the human weakness to, as the Bible calls it, "return like a dog to it's own vomit," I nonetheless considered myself a stranger in this "free world" and longed at times to go back to prison -- the world I was most comfortable in.

Parolees and prison escapees quickly learn that getting free is not the same as being free.

In all the prisons where I served time, seven men escaped -- over the wall, under the fence, packed in cargo or trash trucks. All seven were caught, some within a few hours or days. Only one man lasted nine months on the other side of the wall, but even then the Federal marshals were always one step behind him, forcing him to stay running.

For them, like me, getting out of prison was easy compared to the effort to stay free.

The kids in MacClaren Hall made me come to understand how in the face of extreme instability, like after the Columbine High School shooting, there is in the human emotional make-up an impulse to compromise and return to familiar bondages.

The House recently passed a bill that would allow the Ten Commandments to be posted in schools, a return to that morally dubious era when good Christian children were allowed to pray in school and ask God to give them good weather for the upcoming weekend lynching.

I swore that I'd never be like those meek MacClaren Hall kids who were mortified of a little existential crisis. But parole showed me how easy it is to be frightened of the uncertainty that accompanies a liberated future.

I recognize the panic of some legislators who, when confronted with cultural uncertainty, look back fondly on days when children didn't talk back, women stayed at home and relied on a man's paycheck, and blacks were kept in the fields or out of polling booths.

I've stayed free these last three years by finally accepting that a little uncertainty in life is a good thing. I'll continue to stay free because I've learned that instead of running scared from an anxious tomorrow, fear of the future is simply another way to be in awe of life today.