Freedom's Ring

Last month, before the BLM protests arose, protests popped up demanding for loosening of pandemic restrictions; people wanted to go to work, go to the park, go shopping, get haircuts, have sit down dining. Being told to stay home is an infringement of rights, they claim. It’s an authoritarian power grab. So they clustered together and carried their guns into public buildings and yelled in the faces of cops and nurses. For freedom.

And as some places opened up, the same people continued to complain. Being told to wear a mask in a shop is trampling on their rights. Churches reducing congregation size to 50% is a capitulation of the church to the authoritarian state. Although a vaccine is at least a year away, there are already exclamations to refuse vaccination. Their very freedom is under an attack under the guise of a virus.

They freely share their grievances. They freely gather to protest (breaking quarantine orders but facing no consequence). They freely form groups and petitions and gatherings to discuss the restrictions on their freedom of open shops and not wearing masks and not being vaccinated against a pandemic. They do care about lives, they say. But one’s freedom is more important.

Then a man died after a cop knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes. And the world saw. And the world knew it was just another case of in a long line of injustice. And different protests broke out. Masses of people marching in the street—no guns, wearing masks. They were protesting injustice (and having curfews in place and protests broken up). They demanded that police not kill people. That being killed without trial for petty violations infringes on their rights. Can a black person walk down the street in peace? Can she sleep in her bed in peace? Being fearful of violent cops restricts their freedom. They live in fear of authoritarian overreach. They want justice and equal freedom.

Comparing the two protests feels like night and day. But they were only a week or so apart, and both claimed to be about the foundation of American values. So it’s made me ask: What is freedom?

Broadly, freedom is the power to act, speak, or think as one wants without restraint. Freedom is the state of not being subject to another. When we say America was founded on freedom, we mean freedom from a king, freedom from England’s laws, freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. To be free is to do whatever one wants without repercussion.

Taken to the extreme, it’s easy to see the danger in broad freedom. Doing whatever we want without restraint leads to hedonism. Even “do no harm” is seen as authoritarian and restricting when fulfilling desires is the idea of freedom.

It also leads to the most powerful consolidating that freedom. Those will the power or force to do what they want to others can and will, while the rest must restrict their movements out of fear and self-preservation.

The idea of “do what I want” is not freedom. It is not true freedom to be a slave to our desires and impulses. We can make ourselves slaves to drugs, sex, food, power, or money. True freedom is the ability to become our best selves, to have our will and potential unstrained and our desires properly ordered.

St. John Paul II said, “Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”

Freedom is not an ends; it is a means to do good. The catechism says, “There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to ‘the slavery of sin’ (CCC 1733).”

Are our actions impulses, are they harming others, are they encouraging sin? Are we free if give ourselves over to selfishness, violence, and anger? Freedom lies in our choices, and our ability to make that choice in our society.

Today is Juneteenth. For white people, it’s something we either never learned about or just vaguely heard of. It doesn’t celebrate the freeing the of the slaves; they had been declared free months before. It celebrates enslaved people learning of their freedom and thus, truly becoming free. They couldn’t be free until they knew it and could act accordingly. They suffered attempts at restricting that freedom and having their rights infringed. It’s a continuing battle.

This year, as we celebrate July 4th, maybe we should celebrate true freedom. Not separation from the British or our right to brandish weapons and not wear masks, but our ability to protest, to speak out for what is right, and to continue to choose to do what we ought.