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.
