"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
-- William Gibson
Juneteenth is a reminder that this is the nature of reality. Some groups of people are always dealing with a smaller set of facts, and because of that, they live in a constrained reality.
African Americans are not all fully accustomed to using their freedoms. Though all of us have the right and liberty to pursue nearly infinite options in America, the fact is that most of us don't. We live in the same towns our grandparents live in, we eat the same food, we watch the same TV shows. An example I like to give is this: although all of us have been to McDonald's hundreds of times, how many times have we ordered the vanilla shake?
Jill Nelson published a book almost two decades ago called 'Volunteer Slavery'. She describes how for all of her life she was encouraged to break certain barriers and attain certain goals, for her the march up the corporate ladder. When she got there, she found that she was a prisoner of her ambitions, bound by her commitments to fulfill dreams that hadn't changed. She quit and eventually saw herself and life in general in a whole new light. But she had to take that leap of faith, that even though nobody could see what might happen, she had to believe that she could use her freedom and make it work.
How many of us are volunteering ourselves for the same old positions we have always been told are good for us? How many of us are afraid of change? How many of us have become so accustomed to answering the same doorbell that we think that is our purpose? As a black man who is a member of the Republican Party, I know how difficult it is to break old habits. I know how treacherous freedom actually can be. I understand how stepping outside of commitments to old dreams puts one in the crosshairs. I know the feeling of clumsiness when walking on unfamiliar ground. But this is the very challenge of life, to discover, to adapt, to move forward.
Here I am talking about change and yet pontificating about the Old School. How can I reconcile this apparent contradiction? It's actually pretty simple when you think about it. After all, God is older than the Old School. If you believe in some unassailable truths and you seek after them, then you'll find yourself drawn to some permanent facts about the very nature of humanity. One of them is that we were born to be free, and that we have responsibility to that freedom. It must be worked for. Everybody doesn't work at the same pace, that's why freedom and all of God's gifts are unevenly distributed. We all too often fail to acknowledge who we are as creatures of God. We submit to inferior ideas. We hide our lights under a bushel.
Michel Martin asks if we have a shared freedom:
Is Juneteenth something that speaks to shared values and experiences? And if we are celebrating...what's on the menu?
It seems to me that the answer to that is as easy as asking if you believe that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.
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