In today’s NYT Thomas Friedman claims chaos is expanding in the world. He speaks of the “growing number of un-free people…those who have secured a certain kind of freedom…(but not) the kind of freedom that matters most.” I think this is at the root of our feelings of being overwhelmed here in the U.S.. Because we are feeling overwhelmed, aren’t we? Seriously, how many people do you know who are just tired of – well, if not everything, quite a lot? Each day seems to bring some new outrage that drains us emotionally, something we can protest but are powerless to change – killing of innocent children in a war zone, a man murdered by police and his body left in the streets for 4 hours, refugees freeing repression jailed and sent back to the danger they were fleeing. We are given all kinds of excuses for why these outrages must occur. But I think we all know - there’s a difference between a reason and an excuse, and in this country too often these days we are asked to pretend excuses are reasons. And the excuses are insultingly simplistic, aren’t they? We need to have militarized police because the ‘bad guys’ in our neighborhoods are armed. (Isn’t that the same argument as, we need to allow guns at playgrounds and in barrooms because, well, the bad guys are armed there too?) We need to allow the NSA to harvest every blade of our information because it’s only in mowing down every hay field that we can, you know, find these needlelike bad guys. We need to undergo intrusive searches at airports because, well, you know, those bad guys again. I’ve never in my life known the world was so full of bad guys, those unnamed, amorphous others. You know, the bad guy poor whose food stamps take money from the rich. The bad guy immigrants who bring in diseases and crime and, you know, take money from the rich. The bad guys in the middle east who, well, threaten the oil income for the rich (and pssst, they’re all bad guys aren’t they, or so we’re told, those crazies who’ve been fighting for thousands of years). Then you have all those really terrible bad guys – like whistleblowers and reporters – who want to talk about things those in power are doing that some might consider ‘wrong,’ or even just report the news. Those bad guys need to be jailed or threatened or tear-gassed. What does this have to do with freedom? Everything, doesn’t it? You’re not free when you have to wonder, when you walk into a bar or a playground or a department store if some gun whackjob is going to be carrying, looking for an excuse to shoot his penis replacement. The millions of college grads who are saddled with debt they can never pay off, by banks who were handed billions in interest free loans, are never going to be free of that economic burden, and so can’t even look towards a future with any sense of hope. Those who wonder every day if they or their loved ones are going to be shot or choked or left to rot in the street just because some goon cop thinks it’s okay to kill someone with brown skin if they don’t bow down to you, certainly are not free. Liberty and justice for all? We are aware that this phrase no longer is accurate – it never was, actually. And if we’re truthful with ourselves, we realize that we are powerless to make it so. Holding that knowledge is exhausting. It’s akin to living with depression. As Dov Seidman says in the Friedman article, the inequality of freedom is destabilizing and “even more disordering”. It’s probably time to admit the great American experiment is dead. When you have militarized police, and Big Brother spying, and encoded preferential treatment for wealthy individuals and corporations through tax codes and economic programs – well, that’s no democracy. When we can’t even get our government to act on a major crisis – global climate change – that 98% of scientists agree is destroying the planet – well, you can’t be free if the very place you live is being destroyed. The reality is every empire declines. Ours is no exception. The right wants to pretend we’re still the strongest man in the universe, the left sees signs of ill heath that they believe can be treated so we can return to our past illusion of power and grace, but the truth is, it’s over. Isn’t it? Isn’t it time to admit that and move on to what you should do when someone is dying? The American experiment may not have descended into agonal breathing yet, but it’s on its way there. So let’s try to usher it out with grace, and hope the next Great Hope can learn a few more lessons than we did. Lets write the eulogies for what might have been, what sometimes was, and add in a cautionary passage or two about what others might watch out for in the future.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 12:28:09 +0000
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