Strangers are easy to love as individuals – but as the political temperature in this country begins to broil, can I find anything to love about country?

50 Praises* about Freedom for the Fourth of July (or, like 49, and decolonize Hawai’i)

*If praise can be an ethical intentional to name what is true and stay in relation to it anyway

1. My neighbor across the street has a sign on his door that reads “freedom” in large, rustic patriotic letters. I see it every morning when I leave the house and ruminate on how our definitions of freedom differ tremendously. I suspect, his definition is related to his self- conception of nationhood, based on my observations of his enthusiastic drunken performances of “Proud to be an American” during neighborhood block parties.

2. And me? I haven’t thought a lot about my freedom.

3. That’s not exactly true. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently.

4. It’s not that I dislike freedom – my freedom actually means a lot to me. But the shadow of my neighbor’s freedom as patriotism has cast such a long shadow that I ceded the word entirely to people like him.

5. Freedom feels extremely bound up in whiteness, particularly in the relishing of doing whatever one likes without experiencing any consequences for your behavior.

6. The people who sing “Proud to be an American” most voraciously, aren’t typically familiar with how the song starts. “If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life, and I had to start again with just my children and my wife – I’d thank my lucky stars to be living here today”. Before it descends into full-throated jingoism, the lyrics describe the worst nightmare of many working class white people – the idea that the things they have worked for could disappear. The song cheerfully pivots to the soaring gratitude that Lee Greenwood would theoretically feel to be experiencing deprivation in the United States without ever exploring the origins of this sudden disappearance of everything except his nuclear family.

7. Losing what they feel entitled to own is the worst fear of most of my neighbors and the people in the community where I grew up.

8. There are two different ways to relate to your country – caring and worrying.

9. Caring generates hope, a sense that people can act in ways that will serve one another.

10. The disposition of worry generates a paranoid sort of defensive nationalism, the sense that other people covet and plot to take what we have.

11. I wonder if the historical harms of the past, the faint knowledge that we deprived other people of land, language, bodily autonomy, sovereignty is the root cause behind the fear that someone might take what we believe we deserve.

12. I want to be the freest version of myself but I struggle to know what that looks like. I want freedom from anxiety, freedom from the demands of other people upon my time.

13. James Baldwin writes, “...What it is you want, what you want, at bottom must be to become yourself: there is nothing else to want.”

14. When I was in elementary school, I was cast in a production of Free to Be You and Me, something that I dismissed as banal as I got older. But this Marlo Thomas project had a deeper seed of wisdom – freedom is critical to the practice of self actualization. Do we really want to be ourselves? Do we even know what that means?

15. Most of us spend much our time wanting to be someone else. It’s easier to want to be someone that we don’t know – a celebrity we only encounter in the most cultivated and artificial ways. We might envy the lives of our acquaintances but the closer we grow to them, the more we realize the depth of their private pain. So many of us are just trying to get through the day.

16. I have a friend that I idolized from afar. When my only contact with her life consisted of her social media posts and breezy interactions with her public-facing persona, I felt a profound longing to be her. As our casual interactions became friendship, the depth of her private self- loathing and darkness became clear and I found myself struggling not to resent her. On some level, I felt like she had taken something from me by not possessing the life that I thought I wanted. I had shifted the burden of figuring out who I want to be onto her. If I could no longer envy her, I needed to articulate who I wanted to be.

17. The depth of human suffering is often described in terms of our eons of genocides, wars and plagues but these widespread manifestations of suffering fail to capture the basic human truth that everyone is suffering. Everyone is secretly (or not secretly) a wreckage of desire and ambition.

18. No one feels like they have everything figured out.

19. No one feels like they are thriving.

20. This is one of the reasons that it is difficult to get white people to understand white privilege – because they assume that if they have benefited from white privilege, their lives would feel easy. It’s incredibly hard to be able to hold your own suffering and also the knowledge that the system was built by people who looked like you, for people who look like you. Even if you truly understand that people of color are significantly disadvantaged at a systemic level, you still might not support wider distribution of resources if you think there’s a chance that it will make your personal life harder.

21. My time living in a Buddhist sangha taught me that one of the fundamental truths of human existence is this core of suffering. That doesn’t mean everyone is suffering equally.

22. Achievement will not prevent you from suffering.

23. Wealth will not eradicate your suffering.

24. Fortresses will not keep it out.

25. We can choose to address the roots of our own suffering and we can choose to reduce the suffering of other people particularly by ensuring that we do not offload our own brokenness onto them.

26. It can be dangerous for a person with power to still feel powerless and unseen.

27. I don’t want to deflect my basic craving for attention and power onto other people. If I can’t understand my own freedom, I risk doing harm to other people.

28. I’mtryingtofigureouthowtoliveanethicallifeinaviolenttimewiththeawarenessthat what I do has political and moral consequences for other people.

29. IneedtonavigatethetensionbetweenwhatIwantandwhatIthinkIshouldwant.

30. I trained myself and academia rewarded me to do certain things. Out of a burning desire to achieve and a desperate fear of failure, I delivered. But I have the freedom to choose something else.

31. In order to do that, I have to stop believing that my achievements have kept me safe. That seems mundane but is undergirded by an insidious assertion that other people experience violence because they didn’t properly achieve. That’s not the ideology I want to reinforce.

32. One of the central questions of this period of my life is whether I value my freedom or achievement more.

33. These choices are constrained by the crushing force of capitalism and the pressure to demonstrate my productivity as a measure of my worth.

34. When I was granted a yearlong sabbatical from teaching I thought I would finally experience true freedom. My challenge of sabbatical was to stop checking productive accomplishments off a list. I wanted to understand what freedom felt like in moments when I had no one to please and nothing to achieve except being myself.

35. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t orient to success – who I would be in the absence of the expectations of other people. What this felt like was the freest, more creative and joyful version of myself.

36. Conventional wisdom dictates that as we become older, we make safer choices. We have more to lose, more to protect. We become less flexible and more fixed in our preferences. We don’t make spontaneous choices because we have a clearer sense about who we are and what we want. We have a stronger grounding in our own security and a deeper aversion to discomfort.

37. That isn’t the life that I want. I want to be able to find stability in ambiguous situations.

38. I want more freedom for myself and also more freedom for other people. So much of my thinking in the last ten years has been around how to create a more peaceful and just world for other people.

39. The language of freedom feels co-opted by political institutions bent on building up state power at the expense of other people. But seeking freedom that is extendable, expandable and not dependent on the exploitation of other people might be another way of describing the work of peacemaking.

40. To continually seek to increase the freedom of other people and reduce the amount of domination in the world is the work of justice.

41. ‘Freedom’ is the word we use when we are thinking about individuals, but ‘liberation’ might be a better way to frame what we mean when we think about the collective.

42. I’ve never been in a country that articulates its freedom in quite the way that the United States does. I’ve lived in places that were colonized more recently and that fought wars of liberation but freedom still doesn’t have the salience in those places that it has in the US. I wonder if the narrative of freedom from the tyranny of British colonialism was an intoxicating discourse that Americans retained in the collective imagination far beyond its usefulness or practicality.

43. Freedom for Americans is synonymous with a particular kind of strength - patriotism and is set up as opposed to vulnerability. Sovereignty and autonomy are not concepts with a deep resonance for Americans though they have more relevance for indigenous groups – Americans before America was an organizing principle.

44. There is also something about freedom that is linked to safety – the freedom to leave. When I was living on the border between Israel and Palestine on a fellowship, there was an outbreak of violence. The sponsoring fellowship urged me to leave but I kept telling myself that a good person stays. A good person loves a place enough to suffer with it. A good person doesn’t leave. Someone in my housing complex was shot in the head in front of me by a stray bullet that came in through our window. Suddenly leaving was not a choice but a directive. And yet I lived with a lot of guilt around leaving. I was interrogated by Israeli police officers on the road to the airport in the middle of the night along with my Palestinian driver. I was humiliated at the airport – berated and held for questioning. I was strip searched. I was escorted to my seat. And I felt like I deserved it because I was abandoning Palestine.

45. So when I needed to make a decision about leaving another dangerous situation later that year, I overrode my intuition. I told myself that I was running away again and that violence is unpleasant, but if I wanted to work in this world, I can’t always feel comfortable. Sometimes I would have to work with bad people. On some level, early on in Belfast, I pushed past what I felt and tried to prove to myself that I could remain. Things got really scary, really fast and I was in a situation that I couldn’t get out of.

46. My privilege has been anchored in my agency. Except for my disability and the trauma that was enacted upon me, most of what has happened in my life has been shaped by decisions that I have made. I have acted rather than been acted upon.

47. TheworldhasreinforcedthesensethatIcanshapemylifeandavoidsignificanthardship. When I try to articulate what it means for me to be white, this is a core part of it.

48. Most of the world for most of my life has reinforced the message that I have worth and the agency to make decisions. I have almost always been given the benefit of the doubt.

49. But I don’t feel free.

50. Freedom is a constant struggle, writes Angela Davis. No one is free until we are all free. Free Palestine. Free West Papua. Free Puerto Rico.