Often, I hear or read of people moving to places like Idaho for Freedom. I have even heard some say to get away from the “occupied zone.” I assume that refers to our large urban areas with more traffic and higher costs. I understand the sentiments these attitudes convey. Idaho is a beautiful place with majestic mountains, seasonal changes, and a slower pace. However, Freedom is not the word I would use. Freedom to me is most accurately defined by John Lewis in his book “Across the Bridge.”
“Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.”
Our freedoms are being diminished. We all need to decide how to fight back, how to cause trouble. We have fewer voting rights today than we did fifty years ago. Over 800 deaths a day occur due to poverty in the United States while wealth has vastly increased for the wealthiest among us. We must demand freedom for all people and remind our legislators that they will be held accountable to the people. When we step into spaces of injustice, people will think, here comes trouble. As John Lewis called it “good trouble.”
We take so much from this planet, this place where we live. The ability to correct climate change is vanishing as many deny it is happening. Ecosystems are collapsing. The coral reefs are dying, the forests are being cut, and over the last 80 years half of bird, and over half of fish populations have been wiped out. A third of the planet may soon experience drought annually. And still, we speed forward in pursuit of individualism and consumerism.
We must make decisions based on their impact on individuals and society. We must stop our current divisiveness. By learning to listen and to accept criticism, learning how to use our power differently and ultimately to share our power. As a non-poor nation, we must share our resources of wealth, education, influence, and access with those with less.
We need to show a “willingness to serve without the desire for reciprocation, willingness to suffer without the desire for retaliation, and willingness to reconcile without the desire for domination. Using scripture to justify genocide or promote ideologies of supremacy, has nothing to do with the teachings of the Christian faith or any other faith.”
Kelsey Piper, a staff writer at The Argument, wrote “If America is going to make it, it will be because people choose forgiving things they should never have had to forgive over hurting people, they have every right to be angry with.” The choice is ours.
When evil is disguised as good, such as racism, neglecting the poor, hating immigrants, being totally concerned about making money and being materialistic while attending church each Sunday is our ill-defined freedom wearing the cloak of religion. This concept of freedom was not handed to us by our forebears. This freedom is a failure of the imagination, manifested in language that is thoroughly comfortable, and satisfyingly unchallenging.
Such comfort needs knowledge fostered by curiosity to seeks wisdom which leads us to freedom. We must trust the messenger before we can trust the message. Too often, we have substituted the messenger for the message. It occurred to me that I have met so many people in the world who really care for others. What we lack is not love but wisdom. This means that we must stand in an inconspicuous place where we are not sure that we are sure, where we are comfortable knowing that we do not know very much at all.
We may live in fractured world. It is in politics, in social media, in our families. We need to come together as never before to address our environmental and climate crises, to resist authoritarian movements that have the power of billionaires, the power of social media and AI, at their disposal to divide us further. We need to come together to explore better ways of living with ourselves, with one another. There we will find true freedom.
Oftentimes our knowledge is shaped by those in power which we accept without question. When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America he wrote: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” We have reached the point where we must be conspicuous, less accepting, and ready to act up, make trouble, good trouble. Repair our false understandings, our faults, regain our freedom.
Phil's Personal Perspectives 