A Long Lament -- Once upon a time I was free. Are you?

[ConsAreLiars]

This is just my personal narrative. Yours will be your own. The details will differ since each of us travels our own paths. Whatever the specific history, I am sure most of us are acutely aware of what has been lost. Not in abstract terms, but at a deeply personal life-story level.

So this is my story. Maybe tell your own?


I had the advantage of being born and raised somewhere between dirt poor and working poor, and I never got conditioned into the trap of believing that one's value and worth depends on the purchase and accumulation of things. So in that sense I was born free.

This freedom is very unlike the form of "freedom" reserved to the ultra-rich, the knowledge that they are forever immune from experiencing the consequences of their actions and are forever apart from the real world and living in a protected bubble. They can buy and possess anything that has a price. And, to be sure, with enough money, even the slightly affluent can still travel from one protected bubble to another. But there are many places they can never risk going to and special protections they can never give up. What they think of as "freedom" is just privilege. They are not free. Just blind and ignorant and isolated from reality. A few may break from that conditioning, but very few even see the cage around them.

So I am talking about something absolutely different -- the freedom to move within and experience the real world at the ground level. The freedom to go anywhere, talk to anyone as an equal, and learn. They can never have that.


Granted, it was a long, long time ago. Prehistory for many of you. Once upon a time.


Granted also, I was very lucky. I got a scholarship to one very enlightening (Antioch) college experience that broke apart many of my ideological shackles and then won a grad school fellowship that somehow kept feeding me money even when I took a year off. So I got to wander a bit further and a year longer and experience and learn a bit more than I would have without that extra two grand.

The amount of money involved was not that much (about 1/4 of the average yearly wages then and enough for a single student to easily live for a year in the US) and even if the travels had lasted only 3 months instead of 15, I would have felt and experienced the same sense of freedom that I wonder if any of you, after the last eight years, will ever enjoy.


Here is how I was free.

I traveled through Scandinavia, Western and Eastern Europe by hitch-hiking. Other than a few nights in youth hostels, some more as an invited guest, I just put up a tent anywhere that was not obstructing traffic and slept where I wanted. I traveled freely, without any fear, and without any interrogations or show-me-your-papers (other than a few border crossings) through the US supported Fascist government of Greece where fear of the government was obvious, the Soviet supported Romania of the Ceausescu period where this hitch-hiker was welcomed and invited into a home and treated to a night on the town. I never saw any hesitation to associate with me. And so on, all with no particular sense of risk.


Are you that free?

Can you even get on an airplane to go from one US city to another without showing your papers? Or, if you live in or travel to Washington State, can you even board a ferry to the San Juan Islands without showing your papers to what they call Homeland Security? How long before "Show me your papers?" is what you hear every time you want to do anything but breathe? Are you free?


After that first couple months I met up with a companion and went further into the, to me, unknown. I never visited Iraq. But Rory Stewart, who was on a humanitarian mission there, talked (on the pro-imperialist Zakaria's GPS show on CNN) about how he was threatened and spat upon when walking the streets, and I'm sure you know of much worse. Yet when I traveled the US was murdering millions in Southeast Asia, supporting the most brutal dictatorships on the planet (same as now with a few changes of place) and nothing even close ever happened to me.

So we traveled, not with the elite, always by second class train or bus or foot, through Turkey and Iran where the US supported dictatorship was quite unpopular. A bit different than Iraq, of course, because the killings and torture was then being done by a surrogate rather than directly, but the US was not regarded as a friend of the people and we were warned against wandering the streets of Meshad, a holy city where Islamic Fundies had thrived by positioning themselves as the main opposition to US-supported fascism. Yet everywhere we traveled, other than one rude rube in Turkey, we never experienced anything but indifference or the generous hospitality of of a couple in Isfahan who invited us to share a meal and some conversation - one example of many.

Not one act of hostility. And so I felt free. Scott Ritter traveled to Iran not long ago. Never impeded by the state and welcomed by the people. So maybe you could do the same today.


But do you feel free enough, confident enough, to even dare to try? Are you free? Or has your sense of shame and guilt made you afraid? Or is your awareness of the evils done by what so many of the ignorant and indoctrinated still call "we" and "us" reflected by a recognition that taking retaliation for those crimes should be expected?


Are you free? Do you even know or remember what that word once meant?


After Iran and the end of the rail lines in Meshad, we took a van transport on a dirt road to the border station for entry into Afghanistan. We arrived late at night. Customs was closed so the tent went up in the median between the two inbound/outbound lanes. A Teahouse on the other side was still lighted and seeking some tea or food we went in. Neither, or more likely some tea that I have no memory of, but a palm sized disk of Afghan Black. (Yeah, I know, a teahouse at an isolated border station is almost certainly frequented almost exclusively by border guards and customs personnel, but I figured if they just wanted to bust me and hold me for ransom they didn't need any such antics.) A trippy weird night (search Tennyson and Kipling and Afghan Black for a bit more) and totally appropriate, for we had entered, for the first time, a completely alien world. I learned more there than anywhere. See my journal for more on all that.

But even there, in this utterly different world, I was free. We went where we chose, even freely in and out of a Kabul jail without being asked for documents or being frisked. I was not seen as an enemy. A guest. A bit alien and strange, maybe, but as a guest to be protected and even given special courtesies. We walked to a Buzkashi contest on the edge of Kabul and stood on the periphery of the crowd, and those with a better view from the small set of bleachers insisted we climb up there and join them. Same treatment as in Finland or remote parts of India. Other countries as well, with the same lessons.

So I felt free, I was free. How about you? Now? Could you go there and be free? A few can (at least a few years ago, see http://www.lukepowell.com/ ). Would you dare? Are you free?


How afraid are you now, and how much of that fear is justified by what has been done, allegedy in your name, during the last eight years on top of the mixed legacy of the previous century? Are fearful people ever free?

Can you ever be free when your country is run by non-human monsters, by corporations with no heart and no soul where you are both a sub-human cog for those profit maximizing automatons and a living symbol of their inherently anti-human and inhumane brutality?

Would you, could you do anything similar today? Would you dare, or would you want your kids to travel beyond the corporate resorts and protected enclaves of the moneyed elite? Are you free? Are they? A few maybe, but how many have lost even the ability to imagine that kind of freedom as not only possible and desirable but simply normal?


Have you begun to realize how much has been stolen from you and your children?

What would Lady Justice demand for those who have done that to us?

[Union Thug]

1. Thanks for sharing this. Learning about others here is fascinating.

Me: Working class, strong union (labor radicals) family. Although I was a young adult in the 80s, I was the oldest of 4 and was in a unique position to see the impact of Reaganism on my family. It's an old story - once a single income family living decently and few years into the war on the working class they were eating government cheese. Mom (who had not worked outside the home in over 20 years) suddenly had to get a job, health benefits disappeared. This culminated in my mother's cancer diagnosis and an emotional and financial disaster that, truth be told, created the stress that shattered the family. Once she was gone, we all scattered. I remember a time where my mother was in one of those 'halo' things after major surgery, on the morphine pump, and the credit parasites calling and threatening her. One time, as she broke into tears, I grabbed the phone and threatened to beat the the vampire on the other end of the line into a bleeding mass of jellied flesh. And I probably would have too, given the opportunity. I was young, very angry, and looking for a fight.

I tried to go to college..several times. Many times, but I never finished. With the exception of my first year, I always did extraordinarily well, but something always came up: dying mother, shattered family, quitting to get a second job because a kid came into my life. But dammit, I tried. Check out my myspace page to see the history! :-)

I wandered for about 15 years (worked a million jobs) before I got very lucky. When I put my mind to it, I'm a decent writer (you wouldn't know it from my posts!), and about 8 years ago, I ended up falling into a technical training career which has put me in position of reluctant comfort. Frankly, I never saw myself doing this well. I was very lucky indeed. I don't love what I do, but I do it because it pays the bills and keeps us off the street. I envy those that love their work. For me, it's golden shackle syndrome - certainly not a source of 'freedom.'

With all this, the only freedom I knew was found on a seat of an old Triumph motorcycle. I was never Harley guy - I always preferred British bikes. That was my outlet. I was a late-model "Rocker" (the british biker culture Rocker (as contrasted against the musician image (although music was certainly part of Rocker culture, too)) and had the same working class attitude that those kids and young men did. I'm 44 now and still only feel free on a bike (I have a Russian bike now). It's really all I know.

So there ya are. Not eloquent, nothing special, but another odd little story to pass along.

[ConsAreLiars]

2. Thanks for that. A couple decades had passed and you missed out on

much that I was lucky (Good birth timing, Yay!) to be born into. Roosevelt/Truman had pushed for building infrastructure and the GI Bill and such had funded the college system to the point that children of the working poor could get scholarships and get a few more choices than in the past, or in the present.

Take whatever freedom you can find. Maybe it's a re-living thing, but recently the only times I've felt only somewhat free (ignore that black cloud) is camping by a lake in a free campground. When back from those travels I chose to put justice and peace and basic human decency above income and personal advantage, and I am pretty content as a result. Always blue collar. Making stuff always seemed more honorable than swindling and gaming. Mostly Union jobs, my first was OCAW, straight out of HS, but my recent retirement is not a death sentence thanks to Teamsters/GCIU. And luckily, I worked most of those years in progressive shops, so even the work output was something I felt happy to do.

What a different world it would be if each of us was able to simply work at doing what we thought would provide a gift to others.

[mogster]

3. Good one - K&R

We don't see the changes before they are a fact.

[ConsAreLiars]

4. Thanks mogster (and a kick for more eyes). (nt)

[GeorgeGist]

5. As a descedant of the original people of the NEW WORLD ...

I've seen clearly that your Lady Justice remains blind.

[slipslidingaway]

6. I read this last night and did not comment. How easily we forget

what we have lost, not only for ourselves but for generations to come.

Thanks for the reminder.

:)

[ConsAreLiars]

7. Yeah. "Slip sliding away" captures it accurately. (nt)