Freedom

It has been fascinating and inspiring--and simultaneously distressing and sorrowful--to follow the news from Iran. Unexpectedly, a highly spurious election--the kind of thing we have come to expect of many places throughout the world--has met resistance, as people have made noise, proudly and bravely, longing for a right that is so fundamental as to be taken for granted in these United States of America. And, with July 4th not much more than a week away, this has prompted me to reflect on the nature of freedom.

A common theme of the commentary on Iran has been a bemoaning of the laissez-faire approach of the Obama administration, ridicule and contempt for the lack of forceful denunciations from the world's superpower. The right-wing pundits have hopped on this as a sign of both the president's lack of spine and his acquiescence to the foes of liberty. At this I raise my eyebrows.

It seems to me a misreading of what freedom is. At work I share an office with another English faculty member, our chair, who leans left in his politics, but who is far from a rabble-rousing radical. But for over four years he had one political cartoon on the office door (it came down in January). The scene is titled "Johnny Freedom-Seed," and depicted George W Bush dancing about with a basket, tossing in the air miniature missiles that blossomed not into trees, but small explosions. It is, I believe, a fitting metaphor for the previous administration's worldview of freedom, a commodity that can be given, imposed, transplanted.

But freedom cannot come from another. As we learned from the Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, freedom is not granted simply by our words, but by our actions, the deeds of Gettysburg and Antietam, of Selma and Montgomery. Freedom is not the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein, but in the purple fingers of Iraqis voting years later. The Cold War taught us this as well, as it was not merely ICBMs, but East Germans with sledge hammers, that brought an empire to its knees.

And so I applaud a president who, as John Dickerson argues, understands that we cannot win Iran's people their freedom; they must fight for it. Whether that revolution is happening now or happens decades from now, it will only happen when normal people, pushed too far, like the patriots we honor in our parades next week, decide that freedom is not simply a right of mankind, but a privilege we partake of only to the extent that we understand, honor, value, and struggle for it.