Column by George Sibley
Liberty – March 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
ONE OF THE ENDEARING THINGS about our president is his way of using high-falluting words without concern over the complexities of what they really mean. And when he says things like “the American people need to understand that the war in Iraq is about peace” (shortly before “Mission Accomplished”), there seems to be a tacit agreement that the major media won’t bother him for an explanation – the least they can do to ease the burden of office.
But when he talks about “freedom,” as he has been recently, the American people need to understand that he has a personal acquaintance with real freedom of the most basic kind: the kind of wealth that leaves those privileged to be born into it forever free of the most basic kind of fear and tyranny.
The president’s nemesis, that 20th-century giant whose great works Bush and his minions are pecking away at, was more articulate about freedom, even though he too was born into it. Franklin Roosevelt went so far as to distinguish four types of freedom, which he spelled out to Congress in January of 1941 (like President Bush, laying out the arguments that would lead the nation into a war for freedom, although not so “pre-emptively”). “Four freedoms,” Roosevelt said:
“The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want … everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear … anywhere in the world.”
That is useful; it gives us more to work with than the Bushian vagaries (although Bush did mention “freedom from fear” in his State of the Union address). But anyone who was not born to the kind of freedom that Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush were born to, knows that Roosevelt got the order of the freedoms wrong.
The first and most important freedom is freedom from want, not freedom of expression. Without freedom from want, there is no other meaningful freedom. Freedom of speech and expression are worth nothing to the individual or family that does not know where the next meal is coming from. Freedom of worship is almost as meaningless (although those who manipulate the wealth of the world have always been appreciative of the way religions ease the difficulty of maintaining gross inequity with promises of pie in the sky by and by, to ease the pain and potential rebelliousness of masses tyrannized by want).
Freedom from fear is the second most important freedom, of Roosevelt’s four, but again, the main fear of most American people is fear of want – fear of slipping into poverty, or outright falling into it overnight through problems beyond their control: a debilitating sickness or accident, a “downsizing” driven by top-level efforts to make the truly free even freer, a 9/11ish political act by the desperately unfree of the world that precipitates another recession, et cetera.
HERE IN AMERICA, where we have usually had freedom of speech and expression (largely unused), we have demonstrated this order ourselves, over the past several years, willingly surrendering a discouraging amount of our freedom of expression in return for the mere promise (mostly unfulfilled) of freedom from fear of another 9/11ish event and its attendant recession.
I can speak with a modicum of experience on this ordering of freedoms. I was not born into the want and fear that chronically oppresses so many in the world today, but for a few bad years back in the 1980s I was kind of lost, sinking out of the sheltered middle class into which I was born and raised, with no real strategy for turning this decline around. I was over in the cities of the plain for a while where nothing I knew how to do seemed to be much in demand. I knew in my heart that I could learn how to do, and do well, whatever needed done, wherever and by whomever, but I couldn’t seem to find access to the whatever, wherever and whomever. I remember spilling that out to a sympathetic but ineffective young woman, younger than I, in a temp agency, as she was trying very politely to figure out exactly, or even approximately, where my square peg fit into the rounded-off holes of her world of lousy temp jobs. I knew the tyranny of fear then, waking up in the night and wondering what I was going to do, with
Suffice it to say that something eventually happened, a piece of luck that I was able to finesse with some native intelligence, basic skills and a little desperate creativity; what that was is not important here. What is important was that brief acquaintance with the kind of want and fear of want that tyrannize the soul so fully that any other kind of freedom – speech, expression, worship, choice of colors and models – is superfluous, meaningless.
OUR PRESIDENT (like the Roosevelts before him) has experienced lifelong freedom from want, and freedom from fear of want which is almost as bad. He is of a class that simply does not understand that kind of tyranny. So he and his class can traffic in lofty talk about freedom to vote, speak, worship, et cetera, as though those things actually mattered to the millions on whose backs his own freedom rides.
Meanwhile, he and his class do everything they can to “stabilize” the economic and political systems that exploit the many for the enrichment of the few around the world, and that ensure the steady diminishment of access to opportunity here through capital flight. They wage wars to maintain control over markets that they then declare to be “free.” They lower taxes on investment income to shift more of the burden of societal maintenance to labor income. They eliminate the inheritance tax that feebly attempted to spread excess wealth and level the playing field for each generation. They turn access to higher education into a system of transfer payments from the poor and near-poor to the wealthy (which is what student loans are all about); and they are now going to try to do the same with the retirement safety net.
Thus, in the name of maintaining its own freedom from want, the privileged class, led by our president, spreads want, and it exploits fear to do it. And we are letting them get away with it.
But that’s okay, isn’t it? Because we — meaning you and me, or me, anyway – are all going to be rich ourselves pretty soon, right? Yes, by and by, I think it’s in the Constitution or something: the ultimate American pie-in-the-sky dream, which we are all free to pursue.
George Sibley writes from Gunnison, where he also teaches and organizes at Western State College.
