Freedom from Fear | Happy 4th
It’s 4th of July and people are gathering with a sense of celebration and relief. It can be a loaded day for many — though I suspect most of us just need to be with others. After a 2020 that saw us mostly shuttered and masked from one another and an election cycle that preceded full of shocks and disappointments, we know I think, how much we need people.
Events have really given us the opportunity to think about what we need. There are articles in the New York Times about how limited the political imagination of our system is — and how much we as Americans want and need substantial, tangible change, given all we’ve suffered.
For me, our freedom means that we can become who we are meant to be. As individuals develop and flourish they contribute in ways we can’t anticipate to the overall well being of us as a society, as a body politic, and as people. My experience shows me this belief is not really the norm. And if there is anything I could wish for us as a nation — it would be to take the Ayn Rand out of how we think about individual responsibility, and center more people firmly in how we can collectively ensure this freedom to flourish and become.
It takes a village to raise good, productive, happy citizens. It takes an effective political system, but it also requires that we believe it’s possible. That we believe in what others can contribute and can look beyond our need for personal, familial stability — or that we can understand how our growth and the growth of others can co-exist. And more than that — can lead to a more effective, egalitarian national flourishing.
But we have to believe it. And we have to protect the people who have acted on that belief. Like the African American women, elected to office, who feared for their lives. Or left office. As a recent PBS News Hour piece related. This should be unacceptable. I find it unacceptable.
Just as economic security in and of itself is no guarantee of democracy — China is turning out to be a world competitor in the capitalistic sense that effectively undermines the argument that economic boom and democracy are always natural partners, the freedom to dream only to have no one notice when the rug is pulled out from under you — or your family threatened, is not full freedom.
We can imagine and do better. I think of Janet Elliott. After the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. she famously did a blue eyes brown eyes experiment in her classroom. To demonstrate to the children the costs of racism. You can read about that here. The more pointed question she asked white people gathered to learn from her was, if you know that black people have challenges you don’t — and you know you don’t want that for yourself — how can you be OK with the fact that they have to live with it?
That’s the real question for me. Do you think it’s OK that people are terrorized so completely — offered no protection — that they feel compelled to leave the office they were elected to? This is 2021. Not 1921.
I think the best way to celebrate our freedom is, as Toni Morrison said, to ensure you we really free (and protect) as many people as possible. How can we ensure that? When do we need to say no? What is at our disposal as citizens? And what should be at our disposal? How can we make safe and effective space for engagement and leadership for everyone?
And how do we stem the tide of intimidation, violent rhetoric, and actual violence? For a piece on escalation right wing rhetoric in the Guardian, click here.
What can you do where you are? With what you’ve got?
It took a few hundred words to set imaginations on fire. It was an assertion that we have the right to be free, to live unthreatened, and to pursue happiness, that brought millions here to do just that? How can we grow and foster that idea? How can we make it more real and alive and palpable for everyone? That’s what Martin Luther King wanted.
Places like Highlander Center in Tennessee gathered people together to strategize and learn from one another. I trained there many years ago. But places like Highlander on highly rare, and endangered.
So let me leave you with some Erich Fromm, on this day we gather to celebrate our relative freedom.
“There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.
However, if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden.”