"Freedom Isn't Free"

The title is a well-worn phrase used by a retired military officer and gentleman that I know. He uses this phrase every Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day. He uses this phrase when military remains from foreign wars are returned to U.S. soil. He uses this phrase whenever he is commemorating the passing of a colleague or commanding officer. My friend is fourth or fifth (maybe even sixth) generation U.S. Army, second generation Special Forces (his dad was a member of the very first SF unit), in addition to which he has served in emergency management, is a historian, and a musician with a fine baritone voice and a huge repertoire of songs from what you’d call the Great American Song Book (everything from sea shanties to Oregon Trail, Westward Expansion, military and cowboy songs, etc.). Like all of the fine military folk that I have known, he is unfailingly kind to every person and ever at the ready to help fellow citizens, family and friends, be they near or far.

 

“Freedom isn’t free.”

 

I write this commentary from semi-lockdown in my home during a pandemic that threatens the lives of millions, in this country and abroad. Fortunate I have been to be a temporary worker in a county social services agency when the crisis hit. I have been able to continue to work, as my work was categorized as “essential.” We are managing. My colleagues and extended family in the music world, to a great extend, have suffered financially during the lockdown. So many legions of others, in various walks of life, all over the world, continue to suffer under the necessary privation that this health threat continues to pose. For those in the very lowest income brackets, daily life is a test that seems helpless and hopeless.

 

In the wake of the 2020 U.S. election, in which the incumbent has been decisively defeated (according to the electoral college vote count), there is grave uncertainty: The incumbent is unwilling to concede, claiming that the election was systemically fraudulent without providing any evidence, and is fanning seditious flames among his fans and followers, while stepping away, largely, from the growing needs of the yawning crises (of which the pandemic is only one) and his duty to the people he was elected to serve. The people he was elected, in 2016, to serve are the people of our nation. All of the People. He was elected to serve us.

 

Well, yes, we have been served. We have been served sarcasm, lies (in the thousands), contempt, nepotism, pocket-lining, money-laundering, influence peddling, a long list of rights continue to be hobbled, and the rollbacks of protections (physical and environmental) continue… In short, within the span of three and a half years, we have been served up a litany of woe. Eric Alterman, writing for The Nation, says: “[W]e must also grapple, sooner rather than later, with the heart of darkness in this country that has inspired tens of millions of fellow citizens to support this evil miscreant.”

 

If you look closely at the election results, both from 2016 and 2020, it is evident that these races have been close. What is the divide? I will make the most obvious and facile divide; the country is divided between rural matters and city matters. Note: I did not say “red state/blue state;” that is one of the most false equivalencies, ever, next to “North/South.” What we face in this country is a two-economy system, both of which are underserved by so-called “free market” capitalism. We could find more adequate names for these two systems, but for now I will call them, “Town-mouse” and “Country-mouse,” evoking characters from a story by Beatrix Potter. The reason I choose these names is to clarify that what we face a culture conflict, one that is actively primed by political elites, on “both sides of the aisle,” in order to consolidate power and pork, to divide and rule, and – most importantly – to under-serve and under-represent their constituents.

 

This is the story of the city-folk pitted against the country-folk. Never would I given this much thought, had I not be queried by a young, gen-Z coworker, who saw me engaged in reading on my lunch break. He was curious; what was it that captivated me so? Actually that particular book was philosophy, specifically an historical exploration of subjectivity, beginning with the rise and development of various schools of philosophy extant in the first and second centuries. (This may seem like minutiae unrelated to my commentary, but it is not.) 

 

My young friend’s interest was piqued. “Could I read it when you’re done?” 

 

What could warm a book maven’s heart more?!

 

Well, I came back the next day with several books, including two books of essays by Wendell Berry. Perhaps best known to American readers as the author of the poem, The Peace of Wild Things, Mr. Berry, who hails from rural Kentucky, is a farmer, an activist, a poet, a teacher and – although it does not say so on his Wikipedia page, a philosopher– and I would posit that he is one of this country’s pre-eminent philosophers. My co-worker read Berry’s The Way of Ignorance, and then we talked about it a bit. He said, “Well, there was a lot of farming jargon in there, stuff that I didn’t understand. But, I sort of skipped over the terminology, and once I got into what he was saying, I was, like, yeah. It made me think about things differently. I mean, I’m an inner-city kid, and I have absolutely no idea what it is like to be in the country, and what the issues are that people face, there.”

 

And there it was, in a nutshell. He got it. This is the crux of the matter, the heart of our national existential crisis. 

 

Since the dawn of the industrial age, our nation has increasingly been divided by city issues versus rural issues. As population growth caused cities to spill over into suburbs and industry to infringe on the wild places, increasingly, our politics has certainly become “us vs. them.” In part, I think people have put unfounded faith in their elected representatives. The electorate has been trained to believe that their elected representatives are really working on their behalf – that is, that they are truly representing the desires and needs of the people who elected them to office. 

 

Average citizens forget that industry lobbyists have a lot of money to grease the wheels of what capitalism wants. Whether we live in the city or the countryside, you and I do not have that kind of influence; as a result, our needs are left wanting. Oh, there’ll be a carrot dangled near election time, but once the election is over, the carrot evaporates into thin air. Meanwhile, if policy is made that people don’t want, the excuses fly, the fingers point, and those on the “other side of the aisle” become scapegoats. But, trust me, the scapegoats are a fiction .

 

We have a two-house legislative branch that is supposed to serve the people.  There are always claims of a shadow government. Yes, I believe there is a shadow government, and that shadow government is called capitalism. Capitalists always have millions of dollars to throw around, in order to get to the head of the line in terms of service, but they never seem to have the money to pay you or taxes. Billions of capitalist lobbying dollars are spent in order to do the wrong things for the economy of the people. I’ve said for decades that if we just paid average people what they were worth and gave them access to healthcare and services that are based on actual cost of living indices for each region, it would be less costly than all the lobby money poured forth to keep people from such. If there were to be an equitable system of government, we should get rid of the lobbyists, shouldn’t we? Instead, we have enshrined them in a law that states a corporation is a person. Well, actually, We the People did not do that, but our shadow government did, with the help of your elected representatives and the Supreme Court! 

 

We are manipulated by our shadow government (capitalism) into thinking “other” is the problem. Some of our representatives are career politicians who know all to well where their bread is buttered; these folks are millionaires. How did they amass such fortunes on government pay? This is an old story, but somehow, we don’t want to take at the face value what is thrust at us every single day in the news cycle by a person who has no values beyond “me, myself and I.” 

 

But we are irresponsible if we abrogate our duty as citizens to be for each other. One of those duties is to respect the rights of others. I’ve seen so much bashing and smashing and slamming in the media that I am bruised by it. Are you feeling the same thing? 

 

There is an economy that is good for Town-mice, and there is an economy that is good for Country-mice; both need to be honored and served. That we have been taught to believe – and some of us actually do believe – that some are better than others, that some do not deserve to be treated equally, this is a moral outrage and crime that must end. 

 

Freedom isn’t free. I need you and you need me. 

 

Right now, we’re all spitting and clawing at each other, and not just lobbing pejoratives (such as “libtard” or “ever-trumper”), which is bad enough. My brothers and sisters on the left are just as apt to be in an echo chamber as my brothers and sisters on the right. Mutual disrespect is rampant. The right to peaceably assemble is being trampled by extremists of all stripes. Crimes are being committed unabashedly. Law enforcement is trigger-happy; as one victim’s mother put it, “We called the police for help, not for an execution!” People are not being given due process. Racism has gone from undercurrent to in your face. The hydra of rabble-rousers that follows the peaceful protests grows, in turn followed closely by opportunistic looters. I see reckless abandon and mutual disregard, everywhere. The trash dumped by the side of the road is a message that says, “I don’t care!”

 

Where is our national moral compass? Where has it gone?

 

Never has its lack been more evident than during this pandemic, where people cry “my rights! my rights are being infringed!” when they refuse to adhere to the most basic health and hygiene guidelines. Is it really so constraining to wear a mask or to wash your hands? The news is full of stories and the hospitals are filling with people who have declared the right to flagrantly disregard health directives and put others, as well as themselves, in danger. Some, sadly, have gone to their graves. Humans really haven’t evolved much since the pandemic of 1917; the same grievances were aired then.

 

Well, guess what, folks? We live in a collectivist society. The old adage (difficult to attribute) reads, “Your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.” An individual is not a self-sufficient island, completely free to act at will. This is what we as a society fail, time and again, to understand, to equitably legislate, and to live. 

 

FREEDOM ISN’T FREE! 

 

Freedom is not a ticket to a free-for-all, do-whatever-you-want lifestyle. Freedom is where we hold ourselves and each other accountable to the ideals laid out in the Constitution. Freedom is responsibility to self and to other. 

 

As a nation, we need to gather together around this truism that Freedom Isn’t Free. We need to understand the costs of discipleship to what has been unprincipled, and the heavy cost of deceit. We need to have some difficult conversations about economies – those that are good for Town-mice and those that are good for Country-mice. Repairs are needed. We need to legislate in ways that make sense, not money. We need to mend our nation In the end, it is not “us versus them,” is it?  

 

We ultimately all want the same economy: worthy work, decent pay, sufficient food, adequate shelter in a nice setting, clean water, access to healthcare and protection against criminal activity or invasion. There are costs for all of this. We need to recognize those costs and be willing to share them. 

Anything less is un-American.

  

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Unfinished Journey

1968 was a bleak and terrible year, when I was just six years old. Here is a list of some of the things that happened:

·        March 16, 1968 would be one of the low points of the Vietnam War when between 374-504 unarmed civilians were killed at My Lai by United States troops. 2nd Lt. William Calley was charged with 22 of the deaths and sentenced to life imprisonment, but only served three-and-a-half years of house arrest.

·        President Lyndon B. Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not be run for president in the 1968 election. 

·         April 4, 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of his Memphis motel room. Ironically, seven days later the Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress. 

·        Two months and a day after the assassination of Dr. King, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated while celebrating winning the California primary during his 1968 presidential bid.  

·         The Yippies, led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and other radical groups turned the streets of Chicago into a riot zone, battling Chicago police and U.S. Army and National Guard, while the Democratic convention was being held there.

·         Richard Nixon would go on to defeat Senator Humphrey in the general election.

***

Only one of those events is the focus of my commentary on this day, April 4^th. 

Fifty years ago, today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The shot that was fired ended the life of Dr. King, but not his dream. To some extent, every step forward towards greater recognition and acceptance of the all the variables that define personhood owes Dr. King and all of his colleagues a huge debt of gratitude.

Although the Civil Rights Movement, in the hands of King and other principals, seemed to be drifting, due to disputes about strategy and the rise and disruption a militant black power movement, as other factors, such as the Vietnam War, and ongoing labor disputes all over the country, the signing Civil Rights Act was a seminal turning point for the entire nation.

But King sought more than this. The Civil Rights Act was only a beginning.  King had truly radical ideas, bordering on democratic socialism. He advocated for government-run national health, a national jobs program and guaranteed income for all Americans. That kind of economic vision would have been as much an uphill battle, to say the least, as the Vietnam War, in a time of recessions, government cut-back in public assistance services and a rising neo-liberal philosophy coming from the elite that advocated cutting taxes for the rich in order to help the poor.

But King saw that the only way to achieve any of these goals was for disparate groups to unite in coalition using non-violent demonstration toward growth and  inclusive outcomes, so that the greatest good, and equal opportunity could be achieved for all Americans. In his speeches to labor groups, he talked about servant-leadership. The American dream was about being truly egalitarian. Social Justices not for just one group, but for all groups.

The Civil Rights Act was but the first jewel in the crown. What King suggested, next, because of the overlapping issues, was joining Organized Labor and Civil Rights for People of color in coalition. After all, the March on Washington’s full title was “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” King and his colleagues knew that black workers and their lives were inextricably intertwine with the lives of white workers when it came to all issues of economic security and anti-discrimination. King’s rallying cry was, “All Labor Has Dignity.” But the stumbling block was that this was a battle not just about race, but also about class.

More than any other aspect of his radical thinking, this is what pulled the trigger on King, this day 50 years ago. King’s stance on Vietnam couldn’t have been enough to get him killed; but it was about Jim Crow and segregation, and specifically, poor white Southern labor was not going to stand for an educated and eloquent black man being the putative leader of a movement that combined race and class.

Here we are 50 years on, fighting the same battle, without King, without Ruether, without Abernathy and so many others who were critical to the movement in 1968.  We need to continue King’s journey without him. The future of our world depends on this, and this assertion is no mere hyperbole. Justice can only exist when there are no double standards, and when all people are treated with respect, dignity and equal access.

I may write on this topic more, as time goes by, but I’ll leave you with this excerpt from King's 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here; Chaos or Community”:

“Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains?

“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions. It has been sincere and even ardent in welcoming some change. But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken. Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform.

This limited degree of concern is a reflection of an inner conflict which measures cautiously the impact of any change on the status quo. As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white America reaffirms its bonds to the status quo. It had contemplated comfortably hugging the shoreline but now fears that the winds of change are blowing it out to sea.

“The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites. Even the psychological adjustment is far from formidable. Having exaggerated the emotional difficulties for decades, when demands for new conduct became inescapable, white Southerners may have trembled under the strain but they did not collapse.

“Even the more significant changes involved in voter registration required neither large monetary nor psychological sacrifice. Spectacular and turbulent events that dramatized the demand created an erroneous impression that a heavy burden was involved.

“The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact.”

Security State: All Deposit, What Return?

War economy gave birth to the security state and the promotion of endless fears. Terrorism without borders is the latest on the war front, very possibly aided and abetted by international cyber-crime.

Billions of US dollars have been spent annually to put our soldiers in harm’s way and weapons in the hands of foreign armies, both allies and their enemies. To some extent, United States foreign policy has done more to destabilize than to stabilize the Middle East. Our involvement there has been more about oil and money than the advertized promotion of democracy, much less human rights. By contrast, our involvement in Africa has been next to nil, never mind that human rights are being trampled all over the place and genocide is on the march. There isn’t, apparently, enough money in caring about what happens in Africa. This American disinterest in the plight of African nations has been a boon for China, which has all but moved in to mine the minerals and themselves, bringing their own workers, to the impoverishment of each local populace where they make an agreement with the local despot.

On the home front, billions of US dollars are spent annually to incarcerate people and to militarize our domestic law enforcement agencies. To some extent, United States domestic policy has done more to destabilize than to stabilize our inner cities. The law has seen fit to uphold many of the most egregious cases of police brutality. In large part, allowing civilians the opportunity to stockpile small arsenals has promoted the notion that police have the right to shoot at “suspects” in the kill zone, and ask questions only when the bodies are on the slab. Frequently, what looks like a brandished weapon is no weapon at all; sometimes it actually is a weapon, at others there is absolutely no weapon. The militarized police are claiming, and taking pride while doing so, that they are being “frightened” into what is later called “effectiveness,” and the courts are upholding that position in many, too many cases. While the police are “looking out for their own,” are they also looking out for the rest of us? Shall we bring race relations into this discussion?

Police and Fire unions are among the biggest supporters of local government officials’ election campaigns, followed closely by big development companies. Police and Fire contracts, with heath and pension benefits, take a huge chunk out of any municipal government’s general fund. Some contracts allow officers to become vested in their pension within between five to ten years of service. Some officers “retire” after they are vested. Some of these officers apply for lucrative contracts in other municipalities. Double-dippers, sometimes even triple-dippers abound in a pay and pension system that is not regulated and is completely unsustainable. You have only to look at the rising number of municipal bankruptcies to know that this is true.

Taxpayers contribute most of the money that supports the security state, but are we more secure? My thought is that we wouldn’t need to have “Security Officers” posted outside our grocery stores, if we were really secure. Too many of these jobs are just for show. How can it not be so? Most of the security officers I have seen lately weigh in at over three-hundred pounds, and are attentive mostly to their electronic media. Would such a person be able to apprehend a fleeing wrong-doer? You can’t just be dressed for the part; you actually have to be able to deliver something that recruiters, these dates, call “proven effectiveness.” The world of privatized enforcement seems to include anything in a spectrum defined at one end by the small, well-armed private army (working sometimes outside the law) to the $13/hour actor from central casting, at the other.

There have been too many high profile cases, of late, where people had been arrested, tried and convicted of crimes they did not commit. Better late than never to be exonerated, I suppose, but these costly mistakes would never have been uncovered if it had not been for the growing database of forensic DNA. Meanwhile, innocent lives have been broken and wasted, and some have died before the truth could be uncovered.

The average person’s notion of how police do their work comes from the television. From what is shown on TV, most people would think that every law enforcement agency works methodically from an extremely strict set of protocols. TV police protocols say that you cannot arrest someone and hold them in custody without strong probable cause including evidence. In my town (in real life), two people were arrested for committing a string of arsons. The two do not know one another, and one was at work at the time the fires he is accused of were set; one has jobs and family and ties to the community, the other is a transient. The evidence the police have to bind these two people over has yet to be disclosed in the courtroom, but Columbo would never arrest two people just because someone said they saw the person or because a surveillance tape showed a figure that might just look like the person someone said they saw near one of the fires, if there weren’t so much shadow. There might well be a number of people on the street, if there is a fire in the neighborhood, observing. I do not know how this particular situation will play out; only time will tell. But I find it disquieting that the police do not need evidence and probable cause to bind a person over for trial. The person can be arrested, and the police then conduct their investigation while the one arrested is taken off the street, and isolated from contact with family. I would put a question forward: Does it serve justice and does it prove “effective” to set bail nearly twice as high for the transient as for the workingman? There will be no person raising bail for the transient, so what is the purpose and what does it achieve? Meanwhile, to some extent, the men have been tried in the press: the Mayor of the town has promised to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. The Mayor is up for reelection. The Mayor’s platform is, of course, “proven effectiveness.”

Where did I get the information for this blog entry? I read the newspaper everyday. I hope you do, too.  Much of what we see is a theater, a masquerade meant to imply order, which may not exist, at all. All of the issues and stories I touch on here are related; they do not occur in one-off or in isolation. We need to ask the hard questions about the money we pay for “security.” We need to have better determinations about deadly force. We need to get guns off the streets, period. We need to vote for people who might really do something about all this, rather than shoo in the incumbent rubber-stampers, whose campaigns are paid for by security unions and big business interests. Only today, the new head of the FBI, James Comey, said in interview that cybercrime is the biggest terrorist threat to our security. An argument could be made that it is the biggest threat to world order, but no one wants to go that far. Those claims will only come when economies topple, and then it will be too late.

There is a lot of investment being made in armed security. There is not nearly the same investment being made in people and justice. Major infrastructure changes needed to insure greater electronic security are “too expensive” for big business; it is cheaper for big business to send out new credit cards and pay off insurance claims than to invest in better, more secure systems. What investments are made benefit big business and all the trappings that support big business, including “security guards.” This investment maintains a crippling status quo of economic divide, but what are the returns?

Things will not change until big business gets hurt, and hurt badly. In the event, politics will not be able to save big business, and neither will security guards. For all that we may want to change the balance power, we do not want to see what happens when the hackers bring down the firewalls.