Despicable Freedoms
By Bob Hartman
Freedom is the current "cause célèbre" in the United States, and the signature pal-ette of the American phenomenon. Centuries of plague, violence, religious intolerance and monarchies ruling by ‘divine right’ were reasons enough for 17th century Europe-ans to uproot themselves and undertake a daring, 3-month ocean journey to escape to the New World. Their thirst for freedom and hunger for self-determination, with a cowboy flair, became synonymous with what would become the American libido.
I think we can credit Patrick Henry as one of the earliest, but not the last, American politician to con-flate freedom with struggle and violence when he famously proclaimed to the Second Virginia Convention,1775, “Give me liberty or give me death!”
But does freedom have to cost lives and destroy infrastructure?
If we could somehow rise above all of the opinions and polarization and find an expansive, eagle-eyed view of modern and historic global conflict, it would quickly become apparent that struggling for freedom results in near-continuous death and destruction on a planet-wide scale. And, that this toxic brew is not real freedom at all.The only thing this variety of ‘freedom’ succeeds in doing is to set the stage for the next conflict. In the epic struggles for freedom there is near continuous war, but very little peace.
Real freedom requires everyone, everywhere, to simply drop their guns and go home. Like any addiction, the only way to stop killing each other is to, simply, STOP.
Real freedom takes guts, not gore. But toxic ‘freedom’ isn’t having any of that. Toxic freedom is based on a righteous defensive, bravado where there are winners and losers.
Real freedom is the natural, human right to pursue happiness. It belongs to every sen-tient being. However, the personal traumas, physical and emotional, that most European colonists brought to the New World helped shape a uniquely reactive, if not militant brand of freedom, grounded in fierce individualism, aggressive competition and profit over people. Freedom at the cost of equality. Yet, in 1831 the French philosopher, Alex-is de Tocqueville applauded the young nation for its love of freedom.
“The revolution of the United States was the result of a mature and dignified taste for freedom.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
My goodness, whatever happened to dignity? As an avid reader of bumper stickers, I must admit I get a bit nervous, even insulted, when I see “Freedom isn’t Free”, uncer-emoniously plastered on a dirty bumper. It’s tacky and makes ‘freedom’ look more like an ad for a coke than a sacred, bedrock principle of our Constitution.
Freedom isn’t free? Really? The magic recipe for authentic freedom is this: to every ‘pound’ of freedom add a quarter pound of personal responsibility. And wallah! Freedom without strings. Anyone hawking the sacred principles of freedom at the cost of another’s doesn’t love freedom; they are too attached to their own self-referenced, entitled ideas to appreciate what the fresh air of authentic freedom and compassion smells like.
Tragically, this brand of freedom comes from the dark, fear-based, deeply wounded heart of a narcis-sist, a fascist, a Freedom Caucus Republican, or all three.
Freedom is freedom: the power to act, speak, think and live according to one’s design, without compromising the liberty of another. It is not a political construct where meaning is as irresponsible and dangerous as there are special interests.
When freedom is authentic there are no losers.
But to far-right conservatives and ultra-nationalists, freedoms are vulnerabilities, opportunities to take rights away, opportunities to control and punish immigrants seeking safety, women seeking to control their own lives, men hoping to throw off the restraints of patriarchy.And how strange! In a country founded on the idea of personal freedoms, I see nothing but imprisonment. I see pregnant, laboring women shackled to beds, I see gay men, strung up on barbed wire, murdered, I see a Black man, with White fascist jackboots crushing the life out of him. And, an androgynous male or trans person is fair game for harassment, shaming and soul murder, even death.
As much as these folks enjoy taking freedom away from others, they are very good at exercising their own despicable freedoms, like Second Amendment freedoms that put 300 million killing machines, guns, in the hands of children and adults alike. While fear and distrust are behind the epidemic of guns and gun violence, hubris, arrogance and denial continue to paralyze efforts to mitigate the other critical issues plaguing civilization today.
Conservative elements of Anglo culture are frightened and distressed because they feel they are being left behind, even replaced. They fear women who want to control their own lives; they fear climate change they don’t understand; they fear of the backlash from their own unacknowledged bloody racisms, as we see in their inflamed hostility to CRT (Critical Race Theory), book bans, and ‘don’t say gay’ laws popping up across the U.S.What a rip in the fabric of common sense!
It’s wild. Roe is overturned, revoking 50 years of abortion-on-demand, while advocates cluck that they are saving lives. Yet if gun deaths in this country are any indication, these right-wing fundamentalist influences are not interested in saving lives at all. They are only interested in their unabridged freedoms; but they care nothing for the rights of others. To wit; in 2020, powered by the fever of Amendment 2, gun makers hemorrhaged 11 million weapons of mass destruction into the U.S., directly contributing to 45,000 deaths.
This has nothing to do with freedom. In the U.S., this is mass Anglo hysteria. Speaking of perverted freedoms, pro-lifers think they are advocating for life, but if it’s a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, anti-abortion activists are not only destroying her hopes and dreams. There is a good chance that their solution will also damage the child’s life and may kill freedom for that child’s family for the next two or three generations. They ignore the reality that any life worth saving is worth feeding, protecting and nurturing!
We can talk to rovers on Mars, 150 million miles away
yet make so little social progress here on Earth?
*****
This false flag in the fight for “freedom” impacts world security in many hidden ways. For instance, how do right-to-lifers across the world know that the women they are denying an abortion to, or the fetus they are condemning to poverty, weren’t des-tined to lead the team that would discover a cure for ovarian cancer, but whose dreams, education and opportunities were ‘aborted’ because of reproductive slavery? How do they know that a genius diplomat who finally threaded the path to peace in Palestine never showed up because she was born unwanted or into extreme poverty, never able to get an education?
Of course, you can make a similar argument against abortion, that it prevents a potential leader or genius from expressing their gifts. But there is a stinging difference: the preg-nancy and birth of an unwanted child often results in misery for Mom and family today, and trans-generational trauma and suffering later. Either way, it’s a waste of a brain, a lose-lose situation. Whereas, giving a woman the freedom to do what she knows how to do, which includes limiting the number of children she bears – assuming she even wants children – to those she truly desires and can care for, even if the biological father disappears.
This is not rocket science. It translates into fewer unintended pregnancies, fewer unwanted children. It means that women have agency and power to create mean-ingful lives for themselves and their families, resulting in healthier communities! If there are many unwanted children, the rate of developmental delays in our kids, especially boys, as they are inherently less resilient than girls, will likely increase too, which will stress the entire community and drain its resources.
So, it’s one thing to resist change, quite another to cause local and global communities to languish in a state of arrested development whilst marinating in the juices of our own prejudice and hatred, generation after generation. Gun-toting, angry folks who want to limit the freedom of others, while taking no responsibility themselves are afraid: they’re afraid of being discounted and not seen – in other words, vulnerable.
That white knuckled, sweaty fear takes on the falsettos of White Supremacy and manufactured chaos. And it’s the very essence of Patriarchy: power over, and control. In fact, their ideas are short-sighted in the extreme; s-o-o foolish. And cruel.
Today, these groups aren’t just resisting change, they want to push the clock back 100 years, with the intention of turning the United States into a theocracy. They are selling a highly stylized, false freedom that appeal to special interests.
I believe we know what they want. We know that Marjorie Taylor Green hopes to be an Eichman in Trump’s army. She and her fellows want to control virtually every aspect of private life with a hard-core Christian, Old Testament Bible-based mandate. They want to radically de-regulate industry and open the floodgates of pollution. They want to throw out the social safety net and throw the poor on the mercy of the church.
Folks like Green ‘like’ small, or nonexistent government because without government no one is left to protect ordinary people from their jackboot of a god.
So, there you have it. Weaponized American freedom, the machete that corrodes liberty for one and sharpens it for another.To help push their “cause” down the majority’s throats, there are over 60 extremist, anti-abortion organizations operating in the U.S. today, working not only to ban abortion and limit reproductive freedoms (including re-stricting the sale of condoms), but to insinuate Old Testament values into everyone’s daily life.
And it’s not just the bible-belt extremists who are over-hauling American reproductive policy. We can thank Ronald Reagan for sowing those seeds.
Apart from Roe, U.S. policy has been restricting the global availability of abortion for almost 40 years, because in 1984 the Reagan administration initiated the “Global Gag” rule which was intended to stop foreign aid organizations from receiving American dollars if they perform, advocate for, or refer any woman for an abortion. So apart from the world’s largest arms exporter, thanks to the Gag Rule, the 21st century land of the free doesn’t just support armed violence around the world. We don’t hesitate to infect another culture’s DNA by insinuating our own social DNA into the social matrix of foreign cultures.
The poverty and misery that emerges from our nation’s misguided meddling has fed, and continues to feed, conflict and create chaos around the world, over-stressing re-sources and ruining any hope for dreams. Indeed, countless women and men have lost their freedom of choice because they were forced into institutional poverty, by draco-nian laws that dictate how they should live.And the power of social media has only made it far worse.
Millions of people have been whipped into a frenzy of hatred toward those considered “the other”. Right-wing U.S. policies, exported around the world, have forced millions of hard-working men and women to give up educational dreams for themselves and their children and abandon careers.How many women have, as a result of these authoritarian policies, found themselves pregnant and trapped in a relationship with a violent partner?
Now, I understand why the very idea of “freedom”
has become a joke, inspiring scorn and satire.
*****
The UNFPA (United Nations agency for sexual and reproductive health) recently declared unintended / unwanted babies to be a public health emergency. Yet current American policy, driven by this fear-based minority, is producing a prodigious number of unintended pregnancies and the unhappiness that shadows unchosen parenthood and unwanted kids.
Remember Mother Theresa. She was an inspiration for million; and she stated unequivocally: “The poverty of being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for is the greatest poverty”.
Anti-freedom legislation, like those outlawing abortion, represents a profound loss of the self-determination our founding fathers died for, and specifically fought against. It will be especially traumatic for kids forced into an institutional poverty they did not create.
All too often the immediate result is an unhealthy attachment style between over-stressed, unsupported parents and their children which, unavoidably, sets the stage for future family and societal conflict. As adults, there is a good chance that unwanted children will terrorize humankind and perpetuate the hyper-masculine ideal for 2 or 3 generation, guaranteeing far-right conservatives a place at the political table every generation.
The result: flattening the wheels of social progress in favor of social de-evolution via wrong-headed, toxic legis-lation, obstruction and delay. And more violence, destruction and unhappiness. These folks don’t get that humans are endowed with the innate intelligence needed to determine their own path. So, it’s no surprise that the freedom of choice is not just a feminist credo; it’s a natural legacy of human intelligence that confers the right to choose and the right and the responsibility, to awaken to the suffering of our world.
*****
The ‘Woke’, as in the “Awakened” generation arriving on the heels of the Boomers, heralds the noble conspiracy of radical acceptance, reverence and respect for our fellows and the Earth we call home. The viral objections the Far Right has to being politically ‘awake’ suggests something very sad, and scary.
Here’s what I mean: In the context of the current political discussion, the idea of ‘wokeness’’ (radically different from ‘wokeism’) infers fairness, tolerance, sharing and social systems that support people following their bliss, which, in turn, produces healthy communities.
In the larger social landscape, an ‘awake mind and heart’ invokes harmony through ‘radical’ acceptance, with a life affirming attitude that creates abundance, peace. And, I would add, curiosity.
Does that mean that critics of ‘wokeness’ encourage the opposite? Disharmony, unfairness and intolerance? If you agree that opponents of wokeness are almost uniformly far-right Republican, then it explains why the current majority of Republicans in the U.S. Congress balk at funding critical social programs like food stamps (SNAP), Social Security and tax breaks for families with kids.
These clamps on freedom are life-denying strategies. The threat that “woke” voters pose to today’s Conservatives is partly an identity crisis that seeks to answer the question: “If I am not Progressive, how then shall I define myself?”
Within the context of Christianity, there was little choice but to organize itself around the opposite of a Progressive’s secular ideas. While a simple-minded strategy, chaos is highly effective at gumming up the works of government and progress.
The manufactured chaos we find in the world today is the same suffering, hunger and death that Conservatives must believe in, in order to justify their existence. As if to suggest an overall theme of today’s Conservative attempted coup, by limiting the de-grees of freedom the vulnerable are permitted to enjoy, today’s U.S. Conservative law-makers are attempting to legislate policies that negate life and take away hope.
Today’s Republican party, controlled by the extreme right, thrives on chaos and disorder. What kind of nation might we be if every child, woman and man in America felt reasonably content, healthy, well-fed, empowered and were having their needs met? In other words, if we were authentically free, would the current Republican party even have a reason to exist? I think the answer, and it’s a damning one, is NO.
Today’s Republican party has little to no interest in a healthy and happy America. It nurtures the toxic crops of discontent and resentment in their constituents. And don’t we know a conservative by his zeal to undo the perks of 21st century life? Hammering reproductive freedoms to bits, defunding lunches for school age kids, multiple attempts to repeal health insurance for millions, threatening to defund every safety net program, and destroy Social Security?
Right-wing Republicans, as personified by The Freedom Caucus, have allowed their relevance and very identity to languish in a tension of simple and often ludicrous opposites, where they feel they have little choice but to be anything, “NOT DEMOCRAT”, and definitely NOT WOKE.
Similarly, we build boys and the men they become by similar rules: Never vulnerable, and certainly, never feminine. In one camp vulnerability is a weakness; in another, it is a strength. But here’s the thing: such invincible dogma produces men who believe they too are invincible. Yet, as a man, I know that disowning vulnerability and the feminine aspects of masculinity, makes authentic freedom impossible for us, because it makes men physically and emotionally brittle.
*****
As I have written elsewhere, vulnerability is the archetypal social glue of civilization. And the life-affirming principle of regeneration is the archetypal feminine. They are necessary to a freedom worth having.
Let me explain. Recognizing that shared vulnerability is essential to interpersonal bonding and developing healthy attachment styles, in accepting our innate vulnerability as a species we have created meaningful collective ritual, through shared history. We gather together and marinate in and grow from the strength that creates.
Since regeneration is the only way forward, and how nature and civilization address the future, we are not only stronger sharing our vulnerabilities. We are healthier honoring the life-affirming Feminine, because that is the only way forward. The big mistake lies in believing that true freedom is a stand-alone proposition, devoid of responsibility, and that equality is for suckers.
Authentic freedom is always co-authored with equality. Think of it this way; during the Iron Age (1200 BCE) ancient metallurgists found that if they added a small amount of carbon to molten iron it transformed brittle iron into steel; stronger than the original. In a similar way, adding equality to freedom endows freedom with a steel-like nobility and soul, a product a million times stronger than any tacky bumper sticker. However, far-right thinkers have long hawked the idea that freedom and equality are incompatible.
So, I was surprised to find that the liberal writer and historian, Will Durant (1885-1981), well known for his 11 volumes, “The Story of Civilization” that he co-authored with his wife, Ariel, agreed. As liberal as he was, Durant did not believe that freedom and equality were compatible. In “The Lessons of History” (1968) Dr. Durant famously wrote, “freedom and equality are diametrically opposed”.
This was hardly a new idea. Jean Rousseau (The Social Contract, 1762) wrote: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”. The French sociologist and political theorist I alluded to earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) - best known for his 2 volume, “Democracy in America” - made a similar observation after touring the U.S., its prisons and cities in 1831: “Equality pushed to its furthest extent may be confounded with freedom”. However, recent developments may help us out.
The 21st century ushered in the era of big data. Heiko Giebler, research fellow of the Research Unit, Democracy and Democ-ratization, and Wolfgang Merkel, professor of Comparative Political Science at Humboldt University, Berlin, used a pair of massive databases (Democracy Barome-ter and World Income Inequality), to disprove the Libertarian “trade off” hypothesis.
For the years 1990 – 2017, Giebler and Merkel found in 54 countries a strongly positive relationship between freedom and equality. As Tocqueville admitted elsewhere in his “Democracy in America”, “Men cannot become absolutely equal unless they are entirely free”. This is where that quarter cup of responsibility comes in because:
“It was never assumed in the United States*
that the citizen of a free country has a right
*to do whatever he pleases; on the contrary,
social obligations were there imposed upon him
more various than anywhere else”.
Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Whatever noble purposes the United States was founded upon some 240 years ago, as of 2023 our nation appears to be closing in on a full circle. We fled from the tyranny of King George, plague and religious intolerance, seeking a new life – to be finally free of despicable religious yokes, poverty and the authoritarian rule of the English Monarchy. Yet, incomprehensibly, without understanding our own history, Americans are once again voting against their own best interests and placing all of us within shooting distance of the tyranny of ‘Divine”.
This time it’s the Evangelical Right with, its fascist aspirations embodied in Mr. Trump. And hellish misery will inevitably follow.
I want to be free from the tyranny
of your freedom to tell me I’m not free.