America, Land of the Free?

Two nights ago, I was listening to one of my favourite radio programmes, As It Happens. One of the segments was about the mayor of London (England, not Ontario), and how he was flexing his muscle by banning the drinking of alcohol on the London public transit system. My first thought was, "What? It isn't banned already?" Then I remembered that most countries aren't as ridiculous as the United States (and to a lesser degree, Canada) about personal freedoms. The only transit systems that I know of in the United States that allow people to drink alcohol are CalTrain in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Long Island Railroad, and MARC trains in Maryland (and MARC may have changed that since I learned that). Drinking "in public" is illegal in most of America, yet people claim Communism was an "unfree" system. Well, in Moscow during the Soviet era, pushcarts sold vodka in plastic cups with tear-off lids for people to drink right then and there. The idea that something was wrong with guzzling vodka on a street corner never occurred to the KGB.... America, "Land of the Free".... Ha, ha, ha!