Publisher's Note: Trumpism has upended American democracy in large measure by dominating the attention of supporters and opponents alike. It will succeed to the extent that it exhausts our capacity to imagine a new civic future. The intent of this newsletter is to provide an antidote to our exhaustion through a short daily reflection and a space for discussion to reclaim the heart of our democracy and imagine a better future for all. This week's theme is Turning Our Attention.
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Meditations for the Resistance
Daily Attentional, Volume 1, Week 1
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“The function of freedom is to free somebody else.”
— Toni Morrison
In the summer of 1942, documentary photographer Gordon Parks photographed the daily life of government custodian and mother Ella Watson in Washington, D.C. One of the images, "American Gothic," captures the duality of freedom in the United States.
A Black woman stands beneath the symbol of American promise, holding the tools of economic toil. The black and white portrait calls us to consider that freedom proclaimed at the symbolic level has failed to materialize in the lives of many of our fellow citizens. As economic inequality continues to rise, more people find themselves with less freedom than promised by the credo of the American Dream.
American culture and politics often invoke freedom as a kind of insulation that protects us to pursue our individual ends untouched by the needs or claims of others. We can only extend freedom and opportunity by giving up some of our own. This singular notion of freedom reduces our democracy to a zero-sum contest between competing interests. When freedom is exclusive, our democracy becomes insular and brittle.
Novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison offers a more compelling vision of freedom: "The function of freedom is to free somebody else." Our freedom is not realized until it becomes relational and enlarges the possibilities of those around us. Freedom, rightly understood, is generative. It multiplies for all when shared.
When we use our freedom to expand freedom and justice for others, they then have the freedom to work for the rights of others. When freedom is constrained for some it requires a system and authorities to enforce it, and those systems inevitably expand to make us all less free.
Freedom is real when it is practiced as a right, and a responsibility.
- Toni Morrison, remarks in "Conversations with Toni Morrison," (1994).
- Gordon Parks, "American Gothic," (1942).
COMING TOMORROW: Hope Without Guarantees
