The Elegance of Freedom

Posted byjimmcgarrahPosted inLiteraryTags:, , , ,

The Elegance of Freedom

A few years ago, in the spring when the Dogwoods bloomed and the air smelled like perfume, I happened to be in New Orleans at the time of the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. Here I was, beer in hand, at the Fox Studio stage tent, one of several around Fairgrounds Race Track, listening to a tour de force performance of Buckwheat Zydeco. They are a great Cajun zydeco band, and that type of music has a magical ability to move you physically. It’s impossible to sit still and not tap your feet, clap your hands, bounce your ass on a chair, or shake your head. You must move inside and out. You must feel good. Rhythm surges through every nerve fiber as the music electrifies you with a primal current rising from some savage ancestral plane of song.

While tapping my foot and listening to an up-tempo version of Hey Joe I noticed this beautiful young woman—maybe twenty years old—with coal black hair tumbling over her shoulders and a smile that would make Sigfried jilt Roy. But it wasn’t her physical beauty that attracted my attention. It was her elegance and the grace with which she danced to the band’s music. She could not be separated from the sounds. They were one. I had never seen a ballet, but I remembered an Edgar Degas painting called “Dancers in Blue.” Her tumbling and spinning, her pirouetting, the rising and falling of her arms as she brought the melody into her body, made the painting live in my mind. The complete and utter abandonment and joy in her movements brought me an understanding of what freedom is that I had never had before. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of “giving oneself one’s own laws.” That is exactly what this young woman did

I’m thinking of that moment today, and I’m aware that this type of freedom rarely exists in any society. To exist in a collective, we must remain conscious of others. We can’t always be “a law unto ourselves” if it denies the rights of others. Consequently, we have the word liberty, which is closely related but based on discipline as well. This word liberty is the basis for a democracy and one of the foundation pillars of our country. It’s what has supported us, held us up as the light of the world—a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden—implied as example in the Bible.

However, being a Christian isn’t necessary to understand this simile, just as liberty can be understood and differentiated from freedom easily by the need to be conscious of others. We are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as long as it doesn’t interfere with the “freedom” of other people to pursue the same things. One is related to the individual and the other is related to how the individual interacts with respect for the society in which they reside.

We are witnessing what happens to a society when those terms get confused. The propaganda with which we are fed daily would lead us to believe that all of us can “have our cake and eat it to” while forgetting what happened to Marie Antonette. If you believe that denying other people due process in a society built on the rule of law simply because they might be members of your society illegally, you believe in personal freedom based on things such as skin color, spoken languages, and economic status rather than liberty under a rule of law. You do this by ignoring the rights of others because you have the power to ignore those rights. You are forgetting that power can be, and often is, corrupted by other people who may not like the clothes you wear, the god you worship, or the neighborhood in which you live. On that day, perhaps you will be denied due process. That circumstance becomes more likely the more due process is not upheld for all humans within your society.

I’m not advocating that people who break the law should be allowed to break the law. I’m advocating that we all have a right to make the enforcers of the law to PROVE we’ve broken it before punishment is leveled . Now, there are those people who claim that being deported because you are here illegally is not a punishment. You are simply being returned to the place from which you came. That sounds reasonable, right? However, if one were in a burning house and sought refuge by entering their neighbor’s house to avoid imminent danger, shouldn’t your neighbor allow you a moment to explain why you trespassed before throwing you back into the flames. What if you had small children in your care? Circumstances mean something to reasonable people, to kind people, to fair people. They mean nothing to authoritarian assholes. What a sensible, rational, and decent human being exercises in this situation is called “due process” and because the United States is a country that claims to be full of decent people, it has coded this principle into the laws by which we are all governed.

For people who cross our borders illegally, “due process guarantees everyone in America, including non-citizens, the right to fair treatment and legal hearings when their freedom is at risk. The Supreme Court has confirmed that all persons are protected and entitled to due process under the United States Constitution.” This right is enshrined in both the 5th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. If you disagree with that statement, I urge you to read The Constitution and then be intelligent enough to change your opinion. All a person has to do is stand on American soil to claim “asylum” and then they are allowed a due process hearing before being deported. This is not a liberal or left wing or commie idea. It’s a legal principle all of us agree to if we claim to be Americans who believe in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” If we don’t believe this is true for all people within our borders, maybe we should do the right thing and deport ourselves.

Published by jimmcgarrah

Every single person on this planet is unique in many ways and yet, most people consider themselves normal (i.e. conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected). This dichotomy is how good writing works. It contains uniqueness in the characters or narrator and a normal progression of ideas in themes. Thus, a story will be appealing if it has unique specificity in a normalized world of some kind and that creates a universal connection between writer and reader. This symbiotic connection as an oxymoron, normal uniqueness, has always fascinated me, not only on the page but more importantly, in life. Over the past twenty years I have written a dozen books. None have made me famous or rich, but I am proud of the work. It has been published by respectable literary and university presses. My editors have been talented and conscientious and brought the best of what I do to the page. But publishing is not all of my writing life. I have long wanted a private space where I could more fully express this exploration between individuality and society normalcy without regard to the business of writing, the correction of images, the political implication of phrases, and while considering there might be an audience to some of what is written, not worrying about whether it would sell. Therefore, I give you my very first and likely last, public blog. It will explore whatever I feel like exploring at a given time in whatever form I choose—maybe a poem, maybe an essay, maybe a story, or possibly a simple “fuck you” to the world. Read at your own peril and comment whenever you want. I encourage dialogue as a learning tool for writer and reader alike. I do not expect agreement with all my ideas. That would eliminate the entire uniqueness side of my inquiry. This is a free space for us all.

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