We Say We're Free. Are We?
SLAVES HAD BEEN ONE ACQUAINTED WITH THE HOURS OF OBSCURITY, but slave masters had been the one acquainted with obscurity of the night. Slaves had looked up the brightest city lights, but slave masters had been the one to look down the deprived slaves’ hamlets. Slaves had lived
fearful and seen awful, but slave masters had been the one to live courageous and do the hideous. Slaves had only sung of freedom, but slave masters had been the one to claim had had freedom. Slaves had mulled over the next future as free, but slave masters had been the one to dwell in a moment free. When slaves had finally been portioned with freedom only to seek vengeance against slave masters, slave masters had been the one to feel deprived of freedom only to seek abhorrence towards slaves. Yet both slaves and slave masters had claimed freedom.
The shady ruling governments and the protesting vandalizing residents both claim freedom.
The resentful farm workers and the tyrannical farm owner both claim freedom.
The abusive woman’s husband and the afflicted man’s wife (or visa-versa) both claim freedom.
The chauvinistic neighbor and the discourteous child both claim freedom.
The negligent parent and the addictive mutineer both claim freedom.
We say we’re free. Like birds on the wing zenith the ocean, we all claim to be. But are we?
As I walked out towards the door that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.
– Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
To be a happier person in life, happiness must first be your mind’s soulmate. The very same mode applies with being a free person. In cooperation, a caged bird and a free bird can both fall victims of slavery if they don’t set themselves free. Likewise, both the masters and the slaves in the 400 years of slavery Kanye West has recently claimed was by choice were indeed not free. This may sound unsympathetic to the black people who were sold into slavery during that time. However though, if you choose to be a victim of anything for longer than necessary, you choose to be a slave. And that kind of slavery is by choice. What the white people of those times didn’t understand either was that they too were the slaves of what they thought was sovereignty. Their supremacy and majesty relied on their dictating people of certain ethnicities into their submission. Unlike that of the Grand Creator of all, their supremacy and majesty wasn’t autonomous.
Today we see the very kind of unrecognized slavery with the superior authorities and their aficionados. None of them are free because none of them respect the reality fact that they are mutually dependent on each other to be in their positions. They show the disrespect by despising or augmenting each other’s positions.
To be free is not merely to cast off chains, but is to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
– Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
Nelson Mandela was no Jesus Christ as some people may have sought to make him one. But taking into consideration a pure example of what true freedom is from an imperfect human who could’ve easily resented and avenged, he showed it when he chose not the power nor the vengeance, but forgiveness and reconciliation. Which draws the conclusion: freedom is not the gaining of power to suppress other people or living things, neither it is the losing of a dignity under cruel rulership of a human being or a living thing. Freedom is the application of love in whatever, big or small, we do. Even the bible says if you don’t have love you ‘have become a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal’, you’re nothing. Nothing at all! Nothing! Zilch! Naught! (1Co 13:1-2)
What does it really mean to be a free person?
There are many characteristics that make a free and a happy human. But without love as the cardinal attribute, they might as well just suffer. Here are some of them:
Balance and Understanding. How you view yourself and how you conduct yourself is most likely how you’ll see and treat others. For instance, if you see yourself as a manager, just managing to manage, well, maybe you’ll manage, but you’ll keep causing a mess around you just so you can manage. And you will expect other people to manage as well. There’s no equilibrium there. And where there’s no equilibrium, there is no freedom.
Having a clear view of what you are and an understanding that you’re an imperfect human being with flaws, allow you to understand other people. Instead of being this perfect person who hates others for their mistakes, you will remember that you yourself are imperfect, and love people for the flaws they try to correct. You will know that no saint goes without sinning, and no sinner goes without having some saintly qualities.
Ask yourself:
Am I known for being quick to acclaim or slow to censure?
Impartiality. Perhaps because of certain class, ethnicity, gender, language, personality, or connection, some people in your community are highly favoured over the others. For instance, even today there is cogent evidence of how blacks were commonly treated as inferior to whites, women to men, and the poor to the wealthy. In some parts of the world, and within some societies and families, still bigoted is the case. But ‘two things are bad for the heart – running up stairs and running down people’ as said Bernard Baruch. In most cases people who run down others are unhappy and unconfident. They find their temporary happiness in constantly running down others to uplift their confidence a trifle and satisfy their egoism. Verily though, you can never be free by being a tyrant and a hypocrite. Impartiality is hypocrisy, because one way or the other you’re dependent on those that you discriminate.
Ask yourself:
Am I fair-minded when dealing with people of different class, ethnicity, gender, language, personality or even nationality?
True Amity. True amity can be formed amongst blood related siblings, peers, married couple, families, communities, and also the non-blood related friends. Simply put amity is a cordial disposition founded on love between two or more people. That kind of relation does not reject others for their flaws or reasonable bad habits. It ponders on the good qualities rather than impute bad motives. Many friendships, not to mention marriages, don’t last long these days because no one is willing to stay when the other one shows their rational Achilles’ heel. Instead of replacing a dejected or a misguided friend, a true friend stays to comfort or reprove that friend without imposing. True amity is all about inspiring the best in a person even when a person can be misguided for sometime.
Ask yourself:
Do I remain a crony even when others irk or upset me?
Empathy. One of the mostly failed qualities by people is to put themselves in other people’s place, to understand their situation and discern how it affects them. And one of the most compassionate actions they fail is to provide the help that they can. The obvious example is the mistreatment of the disabled, the old and the sick people. However, the obscure one is to stealthily tap dance on other people’s misery in your heart. There are many people, particularly ostentatious friends, charlatan spiritual siblings and family members, who have done this. They don’t appear to be hating at all, no, not to the eye. Yet they don’t aid at all. Others aid only just to gain credit to their name. Such people are no different from murderers. Empathy is doing to others what you want others to do to you.
Ask yourself:
Do I do to others what I want others to do to me?
Courage. Here in South Africa, black people are still seen as dependent on the government’s catering instead of inventing or doing things for themselves. Although this may be true with a certain group of black people, it is also true with a certain group of people of other races. This may be as a result of parents not supporting their children’s inventive minds, perhaps believing that their children are way too young to venture out into their own paths. However, in the process this shivers grown up teenagers and young adults from taking the necessary risks into building their lives towards independency, and eventually they may feel evermore dependent. It is true that your upbringing, for better or for worse, shapes who you are. It’s the same thing with meeting dismally people along the journey of your life, they shape you. But it is so unfortunate if you’re shaped for worse, because living, alone, means you’re going to be shaped throughout the journey of your life.
Be that as it may, once you become mature enough to make decisions of your own you have to develop some courage to reshape who are. Because although what you are you cannot do anything about, who you are you can amend gradually and at any chosen time. People who lived through times of slavery or apartheid in South Africa had been through a rough patch of cruelty that showed them largely its ugliest side, and perhaps a small bit of the beautiful side. That experience itself cannot be erased from their memory banks. But to allow it to make up who they are instead of making out what they want out of the wisdom or the awareness of it that they have gained, would be letting their lives’ experiences shape them for worse. It would be like harbouring resentment that would in turn make you a bitter person, and in the process nick away your courage and make you unable to act decisively when you see what you must do.
Courage has nothing to do with being a hero of your every situation in life. Courage is being able to let go of the things that retracts you from being the effect that you want to be. Like, if you want to be emotionally free, resentment may retract you from gaining emotional freedom. It’s not easy doing so. After all, retrieving freedom in this world full of unfairness has never been easy for anyone. But freedom is choice at the laudable cost of life the courage one is willing to pay.
Ask yourself:
Have you let go of the things that nick courage out of you?
Do you act courageously when you see what you must do?
Dignity/Value. There is a price of value for everyone. If the most valued house in the suburb is worth eleven million rands, depending on how much the owner values its value, its price never decreases during an auction. Instead it goes higher and higher. To be even safer, the owner will never put the house into an auction that will give it away at a lower than its market worth price.
Reputation or dignity is the one thing most people don’t really value about themselves these days. Many of them have chosen to be the home wreckers, the murders, thugs, rapist/molester, killers, and all the other things people would rather watch on TV than have happening to them in reality. On the contrary, people diminish themselves to an extend that they’ll do whatever is asked of them by the other person regardless of whether it is morally wrong or right.
It’s a shame really, how people don’t care. The value of you is determined by you. But the reality is you can never be able to value yourself if you don’t know how much you’re worth to the one who created you.
In life we have two kinds of people. We have the inspirer, who is always on the verge to bring out the best in others. Most of these inspirers are the people whom life has never been a crystal stair to, and who have been tested and discouraged in life but still teem with high level of self-esteem because they chose to be the best of who they are.
And then we have the discourager, who is always willing to bring down others. Most of them are the people who have been through the worst in life but allowed life to shape the worse in them, and now they want the worse of what they’ve put themselves through to happen to other people. To stand upright, they depend most entirely on crooking others, especially those whom they feel look, sound and do things better than them. Most of these discouragers are the jealous older people, because they themselves never chose to value their dignity in their youth and have deliquesced themselves. To them freedom is jealousy, because jealousy is a type of freedom indeed – the type to keep you remaining where you are and not move forward in life.
Ask yourself:
Am I a person of value and who is dignified?
Am I able to look at myself and look at the next most successful person, and see two dignified persons, without being jealous?
Do I care that what I do now, what I say and what I allow people to see in me now may well determine my abiding self-worth?
Last but not least,
Respect.
Ask yourself:
How much do I respect myself? That much you will also respect others.
How much do I respect my freedom? That much you will also respect the freedom of others.
We say we’re free. Like birds on the wing zenith the ocean, we all claim to be. But are we? Or all these times we have been singing the freedom we hardly understood, and lied to ourselves naively?