Freedom

Different Tribes

Do you think our having dropped into another of our cyclical moments of curbing the freedoms we love to advertise as our national hallmark, may have to do with our fear of each other?

The reason we keep calling our country an ongoing experiment is because our founders, with no clue about how things would unfold over time, made the then unimaginable claim that heredity nor wealth nor power determine a person’s right to freedom.

Of course when they said “all men are created equal,” they meant all white, landed men. Not because they were mean-spirited about women and people of color, but because it would have been beyond their imagining to consider women and people of color equals to white landed men.

Had they envisioned the country becoming a magnet for all sorts and conditions of people, would they have assumed literally everyone should be included in having access to freedom?

250 years seems like a long time to us, since virtually no one lives much beyond 100, but embracing equality, let alone dignity, for everyone, regardless of circumstance, is still a pretty radical idea in practice.

I grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s in the then segregated south. I could go on about having been nurtured by our black maid, in some ways the most mother I had as a small child. But the reality is that I never flinched at the black ghetto where she lived, nor that the only place it was appropriate for me to experience her nurturing was in the kitchen. All that was so imbedded in my bones that I still experience a person of color as a peer as a happy surprise.

My point is that, while our national rhetoric is of freedom for everyone, I suspect most of us are still getting used to seeing each other, everyone, as fellow Americans, worthy of respect. Tribalism persists. While I vigorously support every effort to pry open real freedom and opportunity for even the least among us, most of those I spend time with are pretty much like me.

Instead of vilifying the angry attempts being made to pull us back from this radical freedom for everyone, maybe we could own up to finding it a challenge ourselves. Maybe we could begin by acknowledging that Trump and DeSantis, and the right wing Supreme Court majority, though I vigorously oppose their agenda, are also people whose dignity I am called to embrace.

When I was baptized I vowed to respect the dignity of every human being. Tall order for a species so afraid of difference. As my eyes get opened wider and wider, I see things I couldn’t have imagined and often can’t understand.