Fireworks and Freedom: The Great American Lie
It was late evening in Anstruther, Scotland when an American biker arrived.
The town was preparing itself for the long winter ahead. The streets were bare, the shops empty. I was the only other guest in the hostel.
We were some of the town’s last visitors and together, we walked to a nearby pub. Before long, we’d gathered a group in a corner, and after a second round of beers, a girl leaned over, looked the biker in the eye, and asked him to say “Freedom.” He laughed and said it, the way he knew they wanted it to sound. Freee-dum. To them, he must have sounded no different from the cowboy in a western Hollywood film saying it over horseback, the rifle tipped in the air, the bullets in the barrel eager to say it too.
They tried to sound it the way he did, and failing, they asked him to repeat it. I didn’t mind at all that they hadn’t asked me. In fact, I was just as fascinated. I too was struck by how much more convincing he made it sound.
And sometimes, there’s just enough for us to believe it: the right accent, freckled skin, blue eyes, a bike. A statue of liberty. A blockbuster. Hot dogs and fireworks. It works. It works damn well too.
It is a freedom that rests so delicately on the fabric of symbols and images. It is, put simply, a lie, albeit an incredibly convincing one. Our freedom is delivered to us in symbols and statements that should enrage us with the assumptions they rely on: that we are a population of citizens that can be bought and persuaded with baseless claims and anthems that hardly mimic the true state of our nation.
We calcify our symbols of democracy, and rely on what we’ve built to do the job well. But we are a country that still follows a constitution written by slaveholders. We hold ourselves to a Bill of Rights penned almost a century before the end of slavery. We were writing about freedom at a time when there was only one color in this country that could tell you what it was. Neither the constitution nor the Bill of Rights was re-written after slavery was abolished. A simple amendment was made, and we are wondering why, in 2020, we are still fighting the same systematic racism. How could there not still be racism within a system that was never re-written for a post-slavery America?
So when someone asks where along the great experiment we call America did we fail, say from the very beginning, in the stages before the experiment began, when we wrote a constitution intended for one color. Tell them it failed when we dared write the words “freedom” in a document intended for the founding of a country sought with robbery; when our Johns and Adams put stolen labor on stolen land and dared call it life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Their freedom lived in the barrel of a rifle aimed at the owners of land they needed and bodies of labor they wanted.
It is no surprise, then, that even today our caliber of freedom is measured by the level of force we are willing to use to steal it, though what is stolen never stands firmly against the test of time. And what is claimed with force requires the most aggressive measures of control to maintain it in one’s possession.
America stands as an enviable altar of liberty, only through our clever manner of comparison. Our freedoms are upheld only by manner of contrast with the worst examples of governance. We take America and place it beside countries governed by autocracies and dictatorships. We wave our triumphs before the face of a nation that should know better.
We hold Norway, Sweden and New Zealand as instances of dream-like democracies and leaderships that we can’t reasonably demand to have in our country. As if democracy, civil leadership, and just policing weren’t a thing that could be learned from and imported. We speak of their manner of governing as if we were discussing Norway’s climate, as if it were something particular to that country that could never possibly be replicated in ours too.
It is, however, unquestionably the case that in order for a democracy to survive the test of time, it needs to constantly be revised, altered, and yes, even entirely re-written. From 1913–1992, there were a total of 12 amendments made. The last amendment was made in 1992 regarding the salaries of members of congress, and not a single one has been made since then. It doesn’t help either that the founding fathers have cleverly written into the constitution the most complicated arrangements for changes.
Ultimately, we are a country that resists any alterations, or more accurately, white America does. And a country that refuses to change with times loses its status as a democracy. It becomes irrelevant, just as any business would if it were not constantly readjusting to changing demands.
A democracy is a system of governance bent on the will of the people, and the will changes. And under an institution that has become rigid and unresponsive, what we are witnessing is not the weakening of our democracy, but a creation of something else entirely.
If we were to remove a few symbols here and there, we’d realize, with astonishing clarity, how precariously invented the American identity is and how false our declarations of freedom are.
We have come to believe our freedoms not because they are truly there, but because of how often they are recited to us. For this, and only for this, I thank Trump for sparing us the false illusion. We as activists no longer sound crazy when we talk about the great American failure.
Think of freedom as something handed out in a distribution site, and all of us ‘Americans’ are standing in line, waiting to receive our portions. A white man receives his heavy sack, flips it over, and reads the expiration date: 72 years from now. He is pleased. He knows it means he has 72 more years to live. Then an African-American receives his, a far lighter sack, and turns it over. He reads the expiration date, 2 days from now. And the man being paid $7.50 for his work tells him the Americans stamp these damn things, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Then an Arab-American man gets his, finds a beeping red light on the bottom, covering the date. The distributor whispers quickly, So they can keep an eye on you. Then a refugee walks up and is handed his. He hears the word sorry whispered quickly under the distributor’s breath. The man eyes his sack. It weighs nothing, and when he flips it over, he reads a date, then beside it, reads the words “Court Date.”
The purpose of this analogy is to point out that when we talk about freedom, we need to clarify whose freedom we’re talking about. There’s the freedom of a white man taking an evening walk at ease. There’s the freedom of my Syrian-American father who had police called on him as he waited for me outside my campus. There’s the wine-glass fragility of an African-American’s freedom as he answers a cop’s questions. There’s the possessive freedom of the white who punctures water gallons placed throughout the dessert lining the border.
I’d go as far as to say we never truly had any solid freedom to begin with. We established freedom of speech without guaranteeing freedom of action. More precisely, I mean the freedom to participate in a dangerous manner, a manner that would never allow the government to rest in a place of certainty nor linger long in a position of ease. It would live under a population of citizens that have the power to participate in an effective way, and not in the negligible ways we are currently granted. We have for instance the pacifying freedom of being able to say whatever it is we want to say about our president without the looming threat of imprisonment or death, but we do not have the right to vote alongside our representatives and senators on the matter of impeachment.
Freedom of speech is, at its best, a verbal contribution towards our demands for greater democratic participation, and, at its worst, it tricks us into thinking we have participated effectively and conclusively.
Our right to vote is, in my opinion, an insult to our abilities. We are not trusted enough to be granted any higher levels of participation. And I’ve grown weary of people insisting on our duty to vote. It’s a little like a new employee who is given all the busy work and made to feel a sense of worth by constantly being kept busy with some mindless task or another. At the end of the day, he understands he hasn’t contributed in any meaningful way. And our insistence on voting, and the hostility with which we treat those who do not vote confirms my suspicions that we have more or less accepted that real power rests in our government. Our aggressive campaigns have revealed the extent to which we have submitted to the omnipotent role of a government that has long ago ceased to serve us. Democracy was once the horse and the citizens its harness. And until the recent events that have promised real change, we had, without much of a fight, submitted to the reversal of our roles.
Our democracy, if we insist on calling it that, is a particularly selective one. We all have the right to protest, for instance, but we only discover the sincerity of our democracy in a situation when law enforcement has to choose between one side and the other.
The most recent example is when Trump ordered law enforcement to remove protesters from the area where he wanted his photograph taken before the church. It was a choice between the President’s orders, ridiculous as they were, and the constitutional rights of the protesters. They, of course, chose the President and went on to carry out his orders without sparing any violence. But the choice between a citizen’s rights and the government’s privileges should not continue to be an obvious choice for law enforcement.
There are many other examples of this. There was a time during strict lock down orders when white supremacists stormed a government building with assault rifles without a single instance of police violence or tear gas used despite the aggressive manner with which the protesters handled themselves, an instance that stands in stark contrast with recent examples of violent police behaviors amidst the protests following the murder of George Floyd.
Another situation was one I witnessed personally outside an AIPAC conference when an attending member punched a protester, then quickly retreated behind the police line surrounding the building. Not only had the police witnessed this right before them and done nothing, but they helped shield him until he re-entered the building safely.
Then, if law enforcement isn’t neutral (and here, I am referring to the court judges as well), it is then quite logical to suppose that the law they are employed to enforce isn’t either.
When law enforcement fails, we turn to law and order as if the two are separate, but police are mere bodies of law, capable of monitoring, shooting, arresting, and violating its transgressors. And when police, in turn, fail the law, they are often mutually protected by it. To use the law for the purposes of seeking justice then is a sort of paradox.
It appears then that any hope of resolving the issues regarding the police in our nation lies in our willingness to redraft some of the laws under the current order. We have a justice system in place that idolizes the color of the hand that penned it into being. We treat the law as if it was written by a crusader for justice, as if it weren’t inclined in favor of a particular sect of society. Law and justice are often entirely different, and until we admit this, we will go on waiting on a rule book that wasn’t written in favor of the poor and non-white America to deliver justice. Until the law becomes synonymous with justice, and either word implies the other, and until it is applied equally to all races and socioeconomic statuses, our right to meaningful and lasting change will continue to be dismissed.
There is law enforcement, behind that, the law, and behind that, our prison industrial complex. Law enforcement serves the law, and the law, in certain proven instances, serves an ever-growing industry of for-profit prisons. But this order is often reversed, with prisons appearing at the end of the line, as if certain laws weren’t written with regard to the needs of our penitentiaries to remain at full capacity. We often discuss prisons as a last resort as if the law was written by a neutral hand committed to justice, and that prison is the just and natural consequence of breaking an unbiased list of laws. But the prospects of our freedom and the possibility of change rests almost entirely on the shoulders of our prisons and our willingness to admit to it as the root to many of our problems in law and law enforcement.
Little known to the public is that corporations rally to congress with contracts for the construction of more prisons, all while “confidently guaranteeing to fill a certain number of beds” (Chevigny).
And how to guarantee this but to widen the net of behaviors considered criminal, shower vulnerable neighborhoods with police that treat these areas like war grounds, then, increase funding for the ones gathering the number of bodies needed for those prisons.
And finally, no discussion on our domestic freedoms and democracy would be complete without addressing our practices and behaviors overseas. Perhaps many believe that these are two separate discussions, that our violations of freedom abroad, although unpardonable, are irrelevant to our domestic efforts for freedom when in fact they stem from the same psychology and the same source. The military, similar to our law enforcement, operates on the notion that freedom is finite, that if there is more of it for them, or more of them, there is less of it for us. We see this play out in very obvious ways abroad, where we’ve removed ourselves from all accountability and fear no repercussions, but it is far more subtle and possibly even more effective for its subtlety in the US.
What might be the greatest irony about our proclaimed wars in the name of freedom lies in the fact that the people we are fighting are not at all concerned with the freedoms we may or may not possess but are, in fact, concerned with something else entirely. And yet, we’ve turned images of humvees rolling through the desserts of Iraq into a sort of banner for freedom. We have been trained to associate a country’s level of liberty with its capacity to aggressively defend it. But freedom, founded on justice, is in no need of a defense carried out in its name.
We are no different from the terrorists in this: we use “freedom” to justify our aggressions, while they use religion.
It begs the question: are we guarding freedom, or a possession? We are deploying the antonyms of liberty while claiming that is precisely what we are pursuing for them and protecting for us. In fact, the kind of freedom we understand is, if anything, threatened by our actions in its defense. We do not invade a country to fight an enemy, we invade to create one. We pick apples from the branches of their trees and choose which of them to set aside, to spoil and render to the rest convincing reason to remain. We anger a largely indifferent population with our intrusive and indiscriminate invasion. And often, what you see is a growing network of terrorists that thrives under such circumstances. It is often not ideology, but revenge that elicits young men into the very role we assumed they held when we invaded. But we go on believing that the threats against freedom is something that exists naturally, and not something we created.
Perhaps it was not a terrible thing that our military was deployed against us, even if only briefly. For weeks on end, we obsessed with the brutality they used against citizens, which is nothing more than a preview of the aggressions they are permitted to use abroad. And instead of being outraged over the practices of the military alone, we were, instead, bewildered that it was used against us. The “us” here is significant, because it carries with it an implicit and unspoken permission that these are tools that are to be used for us and not against us. We allow such levels of aggression if it is used in our defense, no matter if that defense is orchestrated or legitimate. Of course, there are plenty who rally against this notion, but we are a nation that largely agrees that our military operates with permission to use violence in the name of protection when I would argue it is used in far more instances than there are legitimate circumstances to justify it.
Our practices abroad, more than any domestic ones, have revealed to us that we are a nation that began and ended on the terribly flawed notion that freedom is a thing fought for and not earned. We are a nation that has carried on an uninterrupted string of wars since the end of World War II under the false assumption that there is enough freedom roaming our lands that is worthy of the eternal wars we wage in her defense.