#1036. Bonds of Freedom 7

The Civil War

Is certainly 

The most peculiar episode 

In U.S. history.

Like all wars

Americans have fought 

It was an unpopular one.

Try to remember that.

The idea of what it was fought for

Has actually been debated.

But there is no debate.

It was fought

Because of the institution 

Of slavery.

Period.

The Union believed

Because of the rising Republican Party

That slavery no longer had a place

In legitimate society, 

That its spread

Should be curtailed.

The South believed

It should continue 

Across new state lines.

Many lies have been told

And believed

Since the war was fought

And most of them

By those who are now

Claiming to be

The proponents 

Of moral superiority.

Strangely,

They obsess over the details

They don’t understand,

That the slavery

They abhor,

That subjugated 

A race 

And warped

And defined

History

Is now

A thing of the past.

They can’t understand 

Disparities

They accept as everyday life

As having anything to do

With the peculiar institution,

That exploiting others

Under gross terms,

Because they term it

Giving the next generation 

A better future 

Somehow means

It’s okay

If the prior one

Suffers.

Put in the hard work!

…Somehow only really 

Required

And is a reality

When someone else

Has to do it

All day

Every day

Of their lives,

Not behind a desk,

Not on paper,

Not networking

But being trapped in a job

With no chance of leaving it

Just for the idea

Of giving your children 

Opportunities 

You never had.

When we look at immigration now,

How many of those we pity

Are going to live

Better lives only insofar

As they are escaping worse conditions 

Back home?

How many are destined 

To live

In their generation, 

The lowest levels

Of our society?

Does that make you proud?

Does that sound

Like a system that is working?

That you should argue

Is worth fighting for?

Does it really sound

So much better

So different 

From slavery?

Slavery, 

In which a person

Had no other choice?

If an immigrant 

Must work in a field

In order to work at all,

That is slavery.

If an immigrant 

Will only find work

By cleaning up

After someone else,

That is slavery.

You don’t need chains

You don’t need a whip

To call it peculiar.

You don’t need politicians 

Calling it a way of life,

You don’t need a state

To exist

To affirm its existence,

You don’t need to breech

The sacred tenets 

Of a constitution 

In order to fight

To preserve

Tyranny.

Reality

Isn’t a set of words.

It is the functioning world around you, 

It doesn’t exist

Out of the good will

And good intentions

Of those who want to believe 

They’re right.

It exists as all society 

Experiences it,

Not as you would hope,

Not as you believe,

But in the real world.

If you believe

You are fighting

For a better world,

Reflect the better world

You want to see.

Don’t preach

And then wallow

In your comforts.

Don’t complain

And then relish

Your easy delights.

Don’t chastise

And then lazily reflect

On meaningless indulgences.

If the better world you seek

Exists in small pockets

And you erode the greater good

In order to fill them,

Then you are hollowing out

In your hollow virtue,

The wholeness

Of the world,

You are emptying it out.

You are not the inheritors

Of Lincoln,

You are the critics

Who hounded him

In the North

In the Union.

Because that was where

He was most hated.

That is what they call

A martyr.

That is what they call a hero.

Anything less

Is everything freedom 

Opposes.

#1035. Bonds of Freedom 6

What exactly 

Were the colonies 

Trying 

To accomplish?

Well, let’s 

Call a spade

A spade:

What was 

Massachusetts?

It wasn’t 

Merely

The imposition 

But the idea

That they had

No self-determination,

No right

To settle 

Their own fate.

These were colonists

Who had lived there

For generations,

For a hundred years.

They were still forced

To relinquish control

To a system

That operated

An ocean away.

They had developed 

A thriving economy,

A way of life,

A culture,

A people

That were different 

From those

Who still claimed them

As citizens.

Citizens of what?

When empires colonize 

They tend to impose

Upon the natives

And it’s the natives

Who usually strike

For independence.

In the colonies 

The natives

Wanted nothing

But to be left alone,

And behaved accordingly,

Including participating 

In strategic alliances 

Even with their enemies 

If it suited them

At the time.

History still struggles 

Determining

That outcome.

But the colonies?

They didn’t see themselves 

As colonies,

Certainly not in Massachusetts.

They saw themselves

As communities.

Uniting the colonies 

Was difficult.

Giving them

An identity 

Ended up becoming 

A political statement 

That changed the world.

And is still 

Little understood 

Today.

#1034. Bonds of Freedom 5

Here’s one of the things

That’s only further confused me

The more I’ve thought about it:

The Nazi occupation 

Of France.

It became France’s whole identity 

To have lost most of the country,

In Groundskeeper Willie’s estimation

To have become 

“Cheese-eating surrender monkeys”

Despite all the great history 

Behind it

Not,

Incidentally,

Merely considering 

A guy named Napoleon,

Who was in one sense

Hitler before Hitler,

Who rallied his country

In a time when it seemed

To have lost everything.

And yet de Gaulle,

The very face of 

The famous French resistance,

Upon which dubiously sits

All subsequent resistance,

Isn’t as famous as Churchill,

Who rallied his own country

To confront the Nazi menace,

To successfully defend it

And lead the world against Hitler

For a time.

Napoleon, whatever else he was

Was no Hitler.

No one in history 

Is Hitler 

Except Hitler,

And it is an insult 

To an actual Holocaust 

We still mourn

While still believing

Jews have no right

To a country

To living

To running their lives,

To ever, ever suggest otherwise…

And this resistance 

Is the signal, last major

Rally to freedom

Of modern times,

Not merely self-determination,

But of a great power of history,

Having lost it

And struggled to reclaim it

And reduced

Only to resistance 

But mostly shame.

These are the times

In which we live.

#1033. Bonds of Freedom 4

One of the things

I find particularly surprising

About the way we perceive 

History 

Is that we tend to overlook 

The importance 

Of European resistance 

To Islam.

Charles the Hammer

Drew the line

At Tours,

Even though

Most of Spain 

Fell.

We celebrate Charles

But forget Spain.

And Spain resisted 

For centuries 

Until at last it drove out

Its Moorish occupiers.

This is the backdrop 

Against which

Cervantes wrote

And Ferdinand and Isabella

Commissioned Columbus 

On his fateful voyage.

Today there’s a musical Quixote 

About the Spanish Inquisition 

And yet in Cervantes 

There are Muslims 

Still literally 

Just wandering about.

Today we condemn Columbus

And dismiss the Spanish

In the New World

As butchers,

And yet this is the actual foundation

Of the modern world.

This is history.

There’s a pernicious 

Instinct 

To rewrite the past

To label wrongs

And ignore achievements,

To pretend

The past isn’t the past,

That there isn’t 

An inescapable 

Chain of events

That in some respects 

Began with Spain’s liberation 

From conquerors.

Well, a long time ago…

As they say.

#1032. Saints of Imperfection

Perfect is the enemy of good.

The best selling point for capitalism is also the best selling point for politics in the U.S.:

It’s messy.

Messy is good. Messy means no one gets to get too comfortable. Comfort is tyranny. Comfort means the few absolutely enjoy a greater standard of living than the many. Comfort is fiction. Messy is reality. 

Messy capitalism means the system can be manipulated. But a system that allows for course corrections is a dynamic one, that rewards innovation, that celebrates achievement.

Messy politics is much the same. The worst that actually comes from messy politics is an opposition that obsesses over reclaiming power.

In every other form of politics, other than the republican democracy practiced in the U.S., tyranny is the word they’re always trying to hide in the description. A system predicated on checks and balances prevents tyranny. For two hundred and fifty years, including a civil war that radically transformed the reputation of the president whose election led to it, the U.S. has maintained an otherwise impossible ideal.

Because it doesn’t look ideal.

It’s the saints of imperfection. It’s the belief that things can go horribly wrong (the Great Depression), but the system endures, both in its politics and in its economy, and somehow manages to enter a world war and emerge on the other side on better footing than anyone.

It’s the belief that mistakes, small and grave, are not the final outcome.

It’s the belief that we can disagree and believe we exist in different cultures, but we don’t, because even the worst disagreement we ever had failed to end the country, the twin systems guiding it.

It’s the belief that innovation drives advancement. For most of human history the core belief was that you could just steal it from someone else, and every single time this somehow only led to decay. 

It’s still early, sure. People like to say the U.S. is still a young country, that there are other countries doing any number of things better.

Better needs to add up, though. The U.S. has fought hard not to fight every war it ever entered, up to and including WWII, which no one could have imagined, both within the U.S. and elsewhere, would’ve led to a behemoth most of the world resents, today, including many within its own borders, among its own citizens.

But there are still great demands on this country, and that, perhaps, cuts through everything else, the belief that even if perceived as adrift it’s still the most needful nation in the world. The world needs it.

The U.S. needs its politics as exactly as they are, it needs its capitalism.

It’s perfectly imperfect. Exactly the way it needs to be.

#1031. Bonds of Freedom 3

When Constantine decreed

Christianity

In the empire

He had completed 

The most unlikely revolution 

In the history of

The world.

Many lies resulted.

Lies about what it cost the world,

Lies about what it replaced,

Lies about what the world became,

All in the service

Of blind,

Willful,

Ignorance.

Christianity changed the world.

It took a civilization 

That was indulging itself

Into nonexistence

And suggested

That maybe

It was better

To see value

In each other,

Not in some myth,

Not in the service

Of an empire,

But in a shared belief

That the point to all this

Is love.

You don’t have to believe

Anything else

To see the value

In this.

So the greatest act of freedom

Is now seen 

As a shackle

The world must escape

In order to emerge

Into civilization.

Well,

Believing that

Is a choice.

A curious one,

If you don’t mind

Me saying.

#1030. Bonds of Freedom 2

Here’s the thing:

Even if you don’t believe

That the biblical narrative 

Is real,

It speaks to something important,

That life under Egyptian rule

Was probably 

Intolerable.

That’s what you really need

To take away

From that.

Somehow modern man

Struggles to comprehend 

Building the pyramids;

I don’t know how to explain 

To future generations,

Because even now

It seems,

Well,

Insane.

“Aliens did it!!!”

Well,

Slaves did it.

Just imagine.

That’s why we hate slavery,

By the way,

Forcing anyone 

To lug all those heavy stones

To someone else’s 

Eternal ego

That in a few thousand years

Is just a fancy tourist attraction…

And sure,

A hundred years or so ago

We all went crazy about Egyptians,

Started the whole,

Continuing,

Mummy craze,

Made King Tut

A celebrity 

Just when the rest of the world’s 

Royalty

Was fading

Into the past…

Well,

These Israelites,

These Jews,

They had a story

About a man named Moses

Who led his people

Out of bondage,

Into Freedom,

Into self-determination.

Moses,

Whom they saw

As an adopted son

Of the state,

Who somehow tricked himself 

Into supporting his own people,

Who unleashed

A series of plagues

Until the pharaoh 

Let his people go

Straight into the Red Sea,

Which parted

Thanks to God,

Straight into the desert,

Where these people

Still grumbled…

Look,

People like to complain,

But that’s the cost

Of Freedom.