red sky at morning

Whatever side on which a person comes down on the matter of the medical procedure de rigueur, the matter of freedom eclipses all concerns in this moment. In light of the president’s statements yesterday, every US citizen should have freedom alarm bells going off, and it’s a five alarm situation.

Those alarm bells have been ringing quite some time now, but these latest edicts directly challenge our responsibilities as citizens. It is time to speak up and stand for freedom – if not for ourselves, at least for the children who will inherit a free country or not.

Call them “emergency rules” or executive orders, “mandates” are not the language of freedom. “Mandates” that affect one’s control of their own body, by force, no less, are the antithesis of freedom. “Mandates” that create favored and discriminated classes in our society are not about freedom. “Mandates” that unduly benefit certain actors who are also relieved of any liability speak directly to corruption, not freedom.

Funny how we used to speak of laws and democratic process, but today it’s just “mandates” as if that’s a thing in a democratic country.

It’s not like we couldn’t see this coming. Twenty years after the events of September 11 saw the Patriot Act hustled through, the door was opened and freedoms have been crumbling ever since.

In the last year alone, censorship – never the hallmark of a free country – has become blatant and broad, and served to obscure data, analysis, and discourse.

Such manipulation has already succeeded in creating a class that scoffs with derision at their fellow man or woman’s rights if their views are not compatible, openly viewing them as stupid or uninformed or undeserving. Such a lack of compassion, vision, or even instinctive self-preservation has not been nurtured with the ideals of freedom, nor by those who would champion our freedom. Sadly, this class, too, who would shut down both choice and discourse, will fall victim to “mandates” of other stripes if they are allowed to proceed apace today.

Today’s concern is not about a pandemic or a medication — this much has become obvious even in the context of our data-suppressed environment. No, today’s concern is about control. 

For every citizen, today’s concern should be whether we have the courage and the love of country and our fellow beings to stand for freedom. And in standing for freedom, by the way, we also choose life and health.

It’s time to wake up and to speak up. Stand for freedom.

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Stand for Freedom

on a labor day

It’s a spooky town. The breath of its deep darkness hangs in the air. Walking these quiet streets, I can feel the rage and torment, the lostness and grief of the men who struggled with their lives for bread and liquor and their place on earth, the bruised women who toiled with terror and hope and despair, the dreamless children who walked the rail in their dirty clothes.

The place seeps perhaps not with their ghosts, but with emotions so intense they linger through the years in the shadows of the looming houses, those vulgar homes too big for common sense, the ones the workers never stepped inside. But those terrible feelings, they permeate the very streets, wash the entire town with a laughing anger, in a final futile conquest of this place. 

Because they own it. They own this town, the specters of that otherwise pointless life-or-death struggle. They are gone and utterly forgotten, but they have an icy grip on this place and they wring it, wring it, choking it with that rage they cannot purge. 

And so inside the quiet rooms of the mansions, in the alleys behind, on the corners of the trendy little main drag, the desperation plays out still. No lessons learned, this labor day, the money still changes hands while a baffled earth looks on. The drugs and the alcohol somehow ensure the clock gets punched, while others tread the mill in their trance. They wake up to breathe another day, the vague sense that something different could exist still somehow pushing the blood through their veins. But there, in the distance, the rumble of the train, soon the whistle blows. Like I said, it’s a spooky town.

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Stand for Freedom

watchful

eyes finally flutter
awake
after all these years
scanning the world afresh
both familiar and strange
surrounded by multitudes
still deep in sleep
pacing and
retracing steps
over and over again
so much to see
awake

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Stand for Freedom