Freedom!
“Freedom!”
-Mel Gibson as William Wallace in Braveheart
“…as we go forward, America needs to be about freedom. It needs to be about freedom from overtaxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation.”
–Governor Rick Perry
“Whenever someone says to you, ‘Freedom,’ ask them, ‘Freedom from what, and freedom to do what?’”
–Edward Peter Fitzsimmons
Edward Peter Fitzsimmons wore a handlebar mustache and a three-piece suit with a heavy gold watch chain draped across the brocade vest covering his ample tummy every day that he taught English III at Northern Valley Regional High School. Back then (the late ’60′s) a very different sort of person was shouting the word “Freedom!” from the rooftops. And so, as a rather formal sort whose life was devoted to out-Britishing the British, he cautioned us: “Whenever someone says to you, ‘Freedom,’ ask them, ‘Freedom from what, and freedom to do what?’”
So I’d like to do just that. I’ve only pulled one recent Republican quote, that of Governor Perry comparing tax cuts, deregulation, and tort reform to the Civil Rights Movement, but I’m pretty sure that you can remember off the top of your head any number of Bachmann, Romney, Paul, Cain, etc, quotes featuring the word “Freedom.”
Freedom from what?
According to them, from bank regulations, the EPA, OSHA, investment regulations, the FDA, in other words, pretty much every government function outside of Congress, the courts, the police and the military. Freedom from minimum wage laws, child labor laws, Social Security, Affordable Health Care. Businesses’ freedom from liability from any damage they do to others in the course of their profit-making enterprises.
Freedom to do what?
To lower wages for the most desperate, to put children in competition with adults in the labor force, increasing the number of potential workers and driving down wages, to poison the environment and skip out on the consequent health care costs, to go back to the pre-Social Security days, when the average worker lived just months past his or her 65th birthday and the leading cause of death among seniors was suicide.
This, they submit, is a way to make America stronger. How exactly having a nation full of injured and sick people unable to afford treatment strengthens us, they’ve yet to explain. Unfortunately, logic leads to the conclusion that the old and sick are just supposed to die off, in a Darwinian survival of the fittest scenario. Maybe that’s why they keep insisting that Darwin is nonsense. Just like the Wizard of Oz kept yelling, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
The Founders, they say, wanted this. Which Founders? I ask. The Founders from South Carolina who refused to sign the Declaration of Independence unless slavery was maintained? Or Ben Franklin who invented the volunteer fire company and the lending library? (You know, people working together for their own benefit without anyone making a profit off it.) Danged if I know.
The fault lines we are seeing now in our body politic have been there from the beginning. From the moment settlers landed in Virginia with the intention of getting fabulously wealthy. From the moment settlers landed in Massachusetts with the intention of creating a theocracy. From the moment Rhode Island seceded from Massachusetts in pursuit of freedom from theocracy. From the moment William Penn began his grand experiment in creating a society based on the principles of non-violence. From the moment Nat Turner rebelled against slavery. From the moment our grandfathers and grandmothers left the factory gates to protest inhuman working conditions.
The Founders. What about our immediate ancestors, who through our constitutional process established those protections that Conservatives love to hate? What are they, chopped liver? Or are they American citizens using the tools of Democracy to better their lives and create a more just and prosperos society?
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”
-Kris Kristofferson, Me & Bobbie McGee
Think about it.
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If you really were a disciple of Mr Fitzsimmons, a) you would not have turned out to be a liberal; and b), worse, you would have remembered one his most frequebntly admonitions, which you violate in the paragraph following the description of him: “Quote” is a verb; “quotation” is a noun. You meant, “one recent Republican quotation.”
Rick Marschall
September 18, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Student, dear, not disciple.
tfgray
September 18, 2011 at 6:19 pm
Just so. I made an assumption according to the hagiographic tone (or so it sounded to me). Student, then. But Mr Fitsimmons might have expected more from a student — he drove THAT rule (about “quote”) into the ground.
What year(s) were you at NVOT? Me, 1963-67. Do you know where Mr Fitzsimmons went, or where he is now? I was just thinking about him the other day. One year — the last, I assure you! — there was “Senior Day,” when seniors were granted many prerogatives. One was to restrict the school’s main entrance that morning to seniors. Mr Fitzsimmons showed up at the front door, smoking his pipe through the handlebar moustaches, silently brooding as a crowd gathered around him… and on the other side of the glass doors, where he was being taunted.
Eventually the door opened a crack, he violently entered, and got into the worst fistfight/wrestling match with some Northvale type. What a scene. Eventually, there were papers scattered all about, and his pipe, which I returned to his desk later. The student was punished; I don’t think Mr Fitzsimmons was — can you imagine TODAY how that would have been handled?
Four years at Northern Valley Old Tappan, and I think the only teachers I respected, and recall, and by whom I was influenced, were Fitzsimmons; Mr Newman; Mr Johnson the art teacher; Mr LaFemina; maybe Mr Simpson the music teacher; Mr Zelanoy. A long road from there (I am at work on my 66th book; et cetera) but that comparatively small number of influential teachers is probably a pretty good percentage. There are an awful lot of duds we meet along the educational paths.
Rick Marschall
September 18, 2011 at 6:47 pm