Meditations on Freedom
Freedom is a delicate, fragile flower. It requires a nurturing hand and the ministrations of intentional preservation. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, that flower is now wilting. Its caretakers turn their faces away from it in indifference and vague disillusionment. Long a crown jewel of the American tradition, a strong vindication for freedom had a bonding effect on the population. People thought of freedom as a shared legacy which they felt a certain invigoration to maintain.
I would make the claim that this mass invigoration has been slipping. And in the age of the coronavirus it has made one of its most disturbing regressions yet. I do not mean to suggest that we have become a society that actively attacks freedom — no, that is almost never how it works.
Instead, our indifference, lingering cynicism and acquiescent attitudes have empowered freedom’s age-old enemies — those in power — to pilfer from it. This is no alarmist stretch of the imagination; instead, it is a law of nature, one strewn repeatedly throughout the annals of history. And I do fear that people do not take the degradations of freedom seriously in our current age, for a number of reasons.
Properties of the present-tense
Chief among these is that the present-tense is famously difficult to criticize (human instinct determines that we…
