Fighting Freedoms

Today's discussion of Amy Tan's essay, "To Complain is American," and the American Radio Works documentary, "Great Textbook War,"  pushed me to think more about competing freedoms.  This is not quite the same thing as Foner's notion that freedom is a contested concept.  Rather, I have in mind situations in which two people's, or groups of people's, freedoms seem to compete or even when one person experiences one freedom limiting another.

In the West Virginia textbook "war" some parents wanted a sort of moral and personal freedom to follow their own beliefs and to decide what their children would learn without an coercion from the school board.  At the same time, public education in the USA is intended to prepare students for their responsibilities as citizens who have political freedom.  Thus the civic community has a stake in those students' learning.

Matt's introduction of the federally mandated observance of "Constitution Day," elicited some of this same dynamic.  Who said, "If the government pays, the government can make regulations?"  In order to have access to resources (economic freedom?), the institution, its employees and students submit to a bit of coercion about our programs.

This raises the related, crucial question: What is freedom for?  How is it to be used?  Tan's essay highlights these questions as she wrestles with the American right to speech, even to complain, the writer's responsibility to speak, and the likely consequences of doing so.  She hints at the distinction we have heard in the news about the proposed mosque/community center in Manhattan.  While the community has a right to build there, that right does not necessarily make doing so a good idea.

Freedom from want

Both the Rockwell poster and the Burbank mural portray "Freedom from Want" with food.  Not surprising, I suppose, since without food, one dies.  But also surprising because food is a "lower level" need in the classic Maslow' hierarchy.  This leads to wonder if in the early 21st century, at least among middle class Americans, we might chose to portray freedom from want with something closer to the top of the pyramid.  Are we content to have our basic physiological and safety needs filled?  This question may come back to us when we take up The Pursuit of Happiness.

Beauty is not optional

In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional.  Terry Tempest Williams "Grounding Truthing", in Open Space of Democracy (Orion, 2004), p. #

Through out this essay and its two companion pieces Williams makes frequent use of allusions to the senses.  She writes of "...sensory impulses of eyes and ears alert toward justice."  Again, "... knowledge is another form of democracy, the freedom of expression that leads to empathy."  Over and over, she invokes hearing and seeing and also other senses not associated with organs: imagination and empathy recur.  Because I'm convinced that our intellects are strong, necessary, and yet limited tools for understanding and living in the world and with each other, I'm drawn to Williams' approach that makes room, in the open space of democracy, for these other ways of apprehending.  These give us access to what is outside us, beyond us, and inside us; they also foster appreciation, perhaps even love.

So, what about beauty?  Why lift that statement out of the three essays?  Perhaps because beauty, as illustrated by the poppies Williams describes in this essay, is vulnerable and precarious and in that way like the "perilous liberty" Jefferson preferred to "quiet servitude."  But, vulnerability and perilousness are not quite equivalent.  Are they?  Isn't there sometime potentially subversive, as well as fragile, about beauty?  Perhaps I'm drawn to this statement and this valuing of beauty because beauty has the power to unsettle our rigid, fiercely held absolutes and, as Williams says, open our hearts.  And this suggests a link between recognizing beauty and responding with mercy.  And, this is why Barbara Boxer held up Subhankar Banerjee's photos of the Arctic.  [His Land in Home project.] She hoped that the beauty would move her colleagues' to see more clearly and respond with mercy and empathy.

Here I should have a link to a recording of "For the Beauty of the Earth," or at least to its lyric.

9/11, Religious Identity, Religious Freedom

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/3301/%22you%27ve_never_met_a_muslim%22/  {Be SURE to check out the photo!  Remember to look at it again when we come to the Statue of Liberty in a later semester.)

I think that these accounts of New Yorkers' Muslim identity are illustrations of Foner's notion of Moral Freedom as well as FDR's Freedom of Worship.  At the same time, recent uproar about plans to build a mosque near New York's ground-zero makes evident that not all Americans are willing to extend this freedom to their fellow citizens.

Foner posits that extension of freedoms has not been merely a matter of including more sorts of people, but also a matter of expanding understandings of the freedom itself.  Surely this is the case for freedom of religion which has expanded from tolerance of some varieties of Christianity to an embrace of the notion of religious plurality, at least by some.

Fram, Fram, Free!

At opening convo today I was struck, as I have not been before, by the final line of the college hymn: "Fram, Fram, Free."  There it is, embedded in our corporate song.  Freedom as the goal toward which we march (or waltz).  A close look at the lyrics would be useful, for what we learn about St. Olaf College's quest for freedom and our notions of freedom and for what the song, as a dense fact, reveals about the context of its being written.  

Things I'd want to explore:

• the odd parallel that St. Olaf's battle in Norway is reenacted every July (really, I've seen it) and the Defeat of Jesse James is reenacted in Northfield every September.
• the use of the term "race" in this song--what did the term refer to in the 1920s when it could be applied to the Nordic race?  What did it mean to Oles of the 1920s, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, to sing about their race?
• the appropriation of the native American term Manitou for so many things on our campus that it seems to be a Norwegian word--is this use more or less salutary in an era when "race" has a different meaning and we (Americans in general and Oles in particular) are more attuned to the difficulties inherent in borrowings from one religious tradition to another?
• the very notion that there should be a college hymn as an early 20th century practice; how does this one compare to others? 
• ritual use of this one: when do we sing it?  why?

And, now I show my agenda: who in this 2010-12 cohort of Am Con will fulfill my long held longing for an early 21st century college song to add to our repertoire!!!!!!!!