Freedom Is Given

There’s almost not a damned thing I can do about the political choices my country’s elected representatives make every day. Collectively, it seems they are about running what started out in 1776 as a pretty good idea into the ground, as though they lost the appetite for doing the good and honorable things. It is all too easy to be corrupt, many of them have discovered.

The ones who retain that sense of honor, those high ideals about what our country should stand for, all that it could mean not just for us privileged Americans but for humanity in the broad expanse of our history and our future, are too few. I could make a list, but I would be surprised if there were more than about twenty-five among those hundred senators and 435 representatives.

What are those high ideals? What defines the honor worth dying for and for which we should strive—so to be a “more perfect” vision?

The Declaration was a good start, a workable blueprint, though I am not certain it was conceived as such. It was more a statement of shared belief, a description of the time and what was important then but which echoes down the generations subject to modifications of meaning consistent with those original phrases—let me edit—that all men and women of any skin tone or geographic ancestry are created equal, that they have certain unalienable rights, including their life, their liberty and their own ways of pursuing whatever happiness they can imagine in their short time on earth.

Those old boys—because boys they were—thought about the nature and purpose of government in context with the monarchy the new Americans would fight and die to replace. They thought about these things, these ideas, with focus and deliberation that are not found in the spoken contemplations of today’s politicians. Government’s highest purpose, they believed, was to make secure the unalienable rights of the people, and a just government would be empowered by the consent of the governed.

We’ve made a hash of it. The government we have today does not look like a “just” government but instead a government where power derives not from our collective consent but from the leverage of selfish wealth. Corruption has become far too easy and shameless. The people’s unalienable rights are under assault, not for the first time or the last.

Abraham Lincoln in his brief remarks at Gettysburg in November1863, remarks which he afterward felt to have been a failure, addressed a nation that he believed had been “conceived in liberty” eighty-seven years before. Liberty had no mere common meaning. It was understood to be an unalienable right.

Lincoln faced uncertainty. If liberty was unalienable, the nation should be “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But that proposition, Lincoln knew, was “unfinished work.” The nation was being tested by a “great civil war.” A nation like that might not last, might not endure. He spoke of a “new birth of freedom” and a government of, by and for “the people.”

It might be significant that he chose “freedom” not “liberty” to describe the rebirth he envisioned. While liberty is a right, freedom is given. If the people around you do not give you freedom, you are not free, you can never be free. Lincoln had issued a proclamation that “all persons held as slaves” within designated areas were “free.” This modified the proposition that “all men” are created equal to include those who had been enslaved. Both liberty and freedom were, and continue to be, high ideals in America.

Franklin Roosevelt, in his January 1941 message to Congress, chose to include his thoughts about the scope of freedom. America’s involvement in the second world war seemed inevitable at that time. Yet, Roosevelt could imagine a world “founded upon four essential human freedoms.”

The first freedom on Roosevelt’s list—freedom of speech and expression—and the second—freedom to worship—echoed the Constitution’s First Amendment. Roosevelt called the third one “freedom from want.” By this he meant that “economic understandings” between nations should “secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.” Roosevelt’s fourth essential freedom—freedom from fear—meant “reduction of armaments” so that “no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.”

Roosevelt believed that these freedoms were “attainable in our own time and generation.” Well, of course, that has not turned out to be the case. As noted above, freedom, however identified or described, must be given. Freedom is attainable only with the cooperation of others.

Lincoln declared emancipation, but freedom was not given. The South surrendered to end the Civil War, but the power to enslave evolved into Jim Crow, which evolved into a governing policy of segregation. The struggle against racial discrimination became the Civil Rights Movement, which reached toward freedom in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But still freedom was not given, and today’s Supreme Court has picked the Act apart, turning the notion of racial discrimination squarely on its head. It is nouveau Jim Crow, a defiant denial of freedom.

Though not secure, the right of liberty is yet unalienable. The prize of freedom is not unwinnable. Though the highest ideals have not been achieved and may never be, it is nevertheless good and honorable to deliberate on them and give them voice.

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Some other stuff for later,