My own entry for "This I Believe"

[thatcrazycajun]

National Public Radio has recently revived a fine old radio tradition: the series of personal essays founded by the late CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow titled This I Believe. Hearing people from all walks of life talk about what their personal beliefs are has inspired me to contribute my own. I do not know if the truncated version of what follows that I submitted will be considered for airplay, but here is the unexpurgated version I wrote today...

This I Believe: Personal Freedom

I believe in personal freedom. Most Americans believe in the general idea of freedom, the one they think of as being embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution's Bill of Rights -- and so do I. But I believe the Founding Fathers (and Mothers!) had more in mind than just the freedom of a people to determine their own government and choose their own leaders. I believe they sought freedom not just for a nation, but for each individual within that nation -- as the first among them, George Washington, spoke of in an address to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790 -- a nation where "everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

I probably come by this belief at least in part through my Cajun ancestry. My forebears were evicted at gunpoint from their original colony in Nova Scotia by the British in the mid-18th century, and came to these shores determined that no one would ever displace or dictate to them again. They built a new community in southwest Louisiana, rich in culture and heritage, hard-working and self-sufficient, devoted to faith and family and fiercely independent -- in short, quintessentially American.

But then, from the Pilgrims onward, we Americans have all been a feisty, stubborn, nonconformist, rebellious lot, with a sheer cussedness about us that drives us to live our own lives the way we see fit, and tell everyone else to go to hell if they don't like it -- and to fight with our last breath and bullet against anyone who claims a right to tell us otherwise. Sometimes this tendency can be carried to destructive extremes, from the leadfooted driver who thumbs his nose at speed limits (that would be me) to the polluter, the bank robber, the rapist and the murderer, all the way to the strife of the Civil War. But sometimes it can manifest in magnificence, as when we fought efforts by King George, Kaiser Wilhelm, the 1940s Axis, bigoted Southern politicians, sexist Northern ones and a succession of Soviet Bloc leaders to dictate to us and/or the world what freedoms we might and might not have. And it manifests today in the struggles for freedom that continue, all around the world and here at home -- struggles in which Americans have been and still are in the thick of the fight.

It's this attitude that makes uppity Muslim or pagan or atheist citizens (or agnostics, like me) believe they have a right not to endure preaching or prayer by Christians and Jews in courthouses or public schools or football stadia. It makes Hispanic and Asian and African immigrants believe they deserve to hang on to at least some of their ancestral culture even as they strive to be accepted in an assimilationist society. It's what gives gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning citizens the nerve to think that the law should treat them no differently than their "normal" fellow citizens...and gave women, African-Americans and other oppressed minorities in times past the same outrageous notion. It makes farmers and ranchers fight to hang onto their land and National Rifle Association members fight to hang on to their guns. It built hippie communes in the 1960s and builds cultists' and militia types' gated compounds today.

And it's an attitude that Americans tend to want to spread around. It makes them fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and work to end slavery in the Sudan and disease-caused suffering in Kenya. It makes them protest against Google and Yahoo! for helping China imprison and silence its dissident citizens and chain themselves to the gates of Fort Benning every November to stop our military from training future Central and South American thug-tyrants. And it makes me want to remind my fellow Americans of it when they misguidedly seek to impose restrictions on others that they would never tolerate themselves, on what we can read and watch or what color we can paint our house or whom we can marry.

I believe that we do need some reasonable limits on personal freedom; laws and rules and regulations keep us all from hurting or killing or stealing from each other, and reasonable people can disagree on the details. But above all, I believe in and treasure the right to disagree, and in fighting for it even when it lets the most odious, repugnant views boil to the surface, like racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism or flag-burning. I believe in the spirit best expressed by Voltaire's famous comment: "Sir, I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend unto death your right to say it." For I know that the skinhead's or the Nazi's or the fundamentalist's freedom to speak and write and campaign is my freedom to do likewise, and that if his freedom is abridged, mine may be next. This I believe.

Comments

[filkferengi]

Well- [and truly-] said, sir!

Well said, space Cadet

[(Anonymous)]

I bow to you, and your articulate speech.

-Julie, the Twizted Texan