We had just returned from a three-month backpacking adventure in Asia.  We had sold most of our belongings to do the trip and now were sitting in the kitchen talking to Helle’s parents about our future.  We didn’t know the answers to their questions, just that we felt like we were not ready to settle.  We didn’t want another adventure on the scale of the one we had had in Asia, but we did want to start thinking about that illusive future that they were asking us about. 

One day while working on the farm I went into the workshop to scavenge a part for the manure spreader and saw our bicycles sitting, dust covered, in the corner.  We had saved them from the pre-Asian garage sale.  I had done a two-week bicycle trip in Poland the year before with a friend of mine, and so I had bags and they were crumpled up in a box beside the bikes.  We had a little money left from the Asian trip and a little time on our hands before Helle had to make a decision about school in the fall.  Hmm…

We’ve all seen the bumper sticker or the sign, or have had someone claim that “Freedom doesn’t come free.” But more to the point, what is the cost of freedom, and what is it? Most people aren’t free.

Most people must make their way in the world in any way they can. Most people do not have the luxury of choosing a profession or getting a degree. Most people on this planet must live out their lives with as little as others are willing to allow them.

There is a price for freedom, no matter how we define it. And while freedom does not come free, it is much more than the platitudinous statement that we so often see and hear. It is so much more than simply protecting our “freedoms” with war, or having the “freedom” to do what I want to do, or being free from regulations.

There is a price for freedom and there are at least two necessary ways of paying for it: intellect and allowance.

We are only as free as we are intellectual, only as much as we understand that we are free. And we are only as free as we allow others to be free. We allow each other our freedoms.

We owe each other our freedoms and we owe ourselves to ability to know why.

On January 6th, a protest by Trump supporters turned into a riot. During the months before Black Lives Matter protesters rioted destroying property. The police did what they could, sometimes too much so and on January 6th, too little. Conspiracy and anger abound. There are too many armed people in this country. Militant groups continue their vigilant conspiracies while the poor point out injustices and CEO’s of banks walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses after committing fraud. Trump and his administration continued the work of the Republicans since Reagan of dismantling the government. The ineptitude of government officials in the last four years was atrocious, it was criminal. And yet the great divide is still defined politically.

This is not a political divide.

This is not an ideological divide.

This is an economic divide.

If this were a political divide then we could discuss policies that would be based upon a common good. If this were an ideological divide then we could discuss the validity of arguments, the strength of evidence. But there is no common good that is defined politically or economically. There is only the common good that we as citizens define, and this is not defined by the ticker tape numbers that flash across screens all across this country. There is Wall Street and there is the rest of us. There is what is good for Wall Street and what is good for the rest of us. There is political ignorance and ideological fear. These things simply feed the need for violence. Guns give the illusion of safety and power. God gives the illusion of purpose and justice. Greed causes wars and Wall Street profits from those wars.

The great divide is a three-part meritocratic tool, a wedge. The great divide is the result of guns, god, and greed.

Note: written in the early 2000’s, I thought the idea was apropos to modern times.

The ‘Lords Day Alliance’ is a great example of what is now called “creating a market”.  The LDA was (and vestiges of its ludicrous ideas still remain) a group of fanatical evangelists bent on prying into the private lives of hose around them for the sake of saving souls.  “No work on Sundays” was their motto and a motto that they felt should be upheld by law.  They were so concerned about the welfare of the human soul that they wanted to make it illegal to NOT go to church.  Of course, working the plate was excused as was the preacher, the assistants and the accountant who presumably counted the money.

            All of this is just superfluous, as most people would have no problem in allowing those pious persons to hawk their wares.  The problem arose as it usually does in the propagation of ideas, non-consensually into the lives of others.  This penchant for the religious to be quelled, unquenched and generally unhappy until their narrow view and self-righteous interpretations of an aged, dated and antiquated collection of fear and hate are taken as the literal law of the land.  The reasons for this seem clear:  like a child, they must be validated in their own belief since evidently they are not happy in their own personal validation. 

They are power-mongers, since they must oversee the lives of others and they are true capitalists since they want to corner the market on working itself, at least on Sundays.  What people such as this really want is to rid themselves of any competition whether that be the business of making money or the business of saving souls.  Any good capitalist wants a cornered market for themselves and in the case of these religious zealots, if a few souls get saved in the process, so much the better.

The holidays are past and there is New Year’s Eve left, where those who had to hold their tongues at the dinner table can drink their stresses away, and those that couldn’t help themselves can reassure themselves that they were in the right. The turkey couldn’t stuff the mouths that couldn’t keep the peace fast enough.

The little jabs, and the nonchalant references, and our insistence upon commenting on that one post. We can’t even talk about pandemics. And the fear, and the fear-mongering. It’s all wrapped up in that forty-eight hour period we call Christmas.

Out on the lawns are Santa Clauses and crosses. There are empty lawns and the last of the political signs still standing in defiance. It seems we all have a point to make, and being holed up in our houses we cannot drive around boasting our bumper stickers in traffic. But the corporate machine rolls on, it just invades our homes now.

There is a divide between fear and the unfortunate. There are the empty slogans that boast “freedoms” and “rights”, and there are the enlightened ones that are teachers but have never been students. There is the ignorant and the stupid, and never the twain shall meet. The common theme is anger, and the common thread is fear.

The holidays are past, but the problems that we all have had to face, separate but together, remain. An answer seems impossible. A solution seems unimaginable. Certainty is inevitable. And yet in the grey corners when the shouting stops and the high horse is simply the pony that it is, and we we look past our tribes and realize that none of this is necessary can we say that we may have been wrong, but we were trying to do right?