For several months I have been mentally writing a blog post about individual freedom. From time to time I switch to another topic, yet I always return to the same theme, questioning—what is freedom? In a spiritual context, Taoist/Buddhist teachings tell me that freedom is breaking free from the wants and desires of my monkey mind. But today, not trying to be free from my mind, I am engrossed the in material world, letting my mind ruminate on the topic of being free.
My interest in the concept of freedom may be connected to my sun sign of Libra (justice/balance), but more likely it is because I had the good fortune to work in litigation for the Attorney General of Virginia. My sole focus for three years was understanding and defending the First Amendment. Prior to this experience, I thought Constitutional Law was boring and wondered why anyone would want to specialize in it. I was so wrong.
Since the mid-1980’s I have been writing and teaching that everyone (and everything) is connected. We are not separate, although we act as though we are. We are absolutely, positively interdependent, everything we do affects the whole. We are entangled, as Dean Radins’ work supports.
Yet, for probably most of our human existence, after tribal communities, we have lived a fantasy story that says we are separate from each other, from our Spiritual Self, from the whole of the earth. Because of thinking we are separate, and acting on it, life as we know it is no longer sustainable. We are witnesses to the failure of our civilization.
Which brings me back to the Constitution. All of my life I have taken the American lifestyle—(good, bad or indifferent) for granted. And yet, our democracy clings by a very thin thread we called the Constitution and the will of the people.
Because of the resistance to wearing a mask, I’ve been thinking about the Constitution and the freedoms it provides. This includes the freedom to act (liberty) and the demands/responsibilities that liberty makes on us. I want to believe that in our society we balance the freedom of the individual with what is the common good.
Our laws are meant to protect us not only from harm but from considerable and demonstrable risk of harm. This is why, even in a society that places great value on freedom, the common good sometimes outweighs individual liberty. There are behaviors that are so harmful, or so potentially harmful, that allowing them would reduce our collective well-being. It would seem that today there is a lot of gray area around this subject.
Maybe we don’t know the true value of wearing, or not wearing a mask, but we can see the outcome and anger when someone believes their individual rights outweighs the good of the whole. In the least, by wearing a mask, I have learned to not touch my face or stick my glasses or pen in my mouth.
In the past I didn’t give much thought to the fact that our democracy takes responsibility, it isn’t free. Until recently, I didn’t think about the fact that Democracy takes a moral and/or political obligation, dependent upon an unwritten agreement among ourselves to form our society. We have a responsibility to follow rules, or laws, which have been established in the public’s interest. Your freedom ends where my nose begins. Of course, if we behaved as if we were our brother’s keeper, or if we truly believed that we were not separate, we would not need most of the laws we have today.
Even if there were no coronavirus, we curtail our behavior and that of our fellow citizens in all sorts of ways. For instance, I cannot ignore stop signs or (if I smoked) light up a cigarette in the middle of a grocery store. We wear seat belts, and, usually, obey no-trespassing signs. We don’t race 90 miles and hour through a residential area. (Imagine if during the London Blitz there’d been a whole bunch of people saying, “I’ll turn my lights on if I feel like it.”)
Many of us have made significant sacrifices over this past year, some profound and painful. Given the frustration and the anger that is still very present I suspect we have more sacrifice to come. We are so eager to return to “normal” (whatever that means) we ignore social distancing and wearing a mask, thinking that a vaccine (which is still being trialed) will protect us. Voting restriction legislation will not go quietly into the night. And we are still teetering between Democracy and Fascism.
That said, I like to think that during this past year we’ve also learned something about our responsibilities to each other and what really matters. It would be a real shame to let our experiences go to waste. We’re going to need this awareness as we go into the future.