Celebrating freedom in troubled times

I used to live on a military base, and if you've ever been stationed away from home, living in a military community, you know how big a deal celebrating Independence Day is. I'd always been a bit of a sucker for fireworks and history, but mixed with the pomp and circumstance of soldiers and tanks and military bands passing by your front door? Be still my heart. But with age comes, it is hoped, wisdom. My country and I, we've been through too much for just razzmatazz to turn my head these days. What may have been a starstruck love when I was young has turned uneasy and suspicious now. The thought of facing another Fourth of July is feels — hollow. With the headlines spinning out our daily cycle of national dismay — reliving the insurrection attempt at our own Capitol at the Jan. 6 hearings, hearing the latest round of Supreme Court rulings that unravel the threads of landmark decisions their predecessors carefully stitched together — I have heard this sentiment a lot this week. My America has felt a lot less like America to me lately. Maybe this isn't the year to celebrate America's birthday. Maybe this is the year America needs to just sit over there and think about what it's done. I know somebody who did this once to her son when he was young and being defiant. I don't know what he'd done to deserve losing his birthday party, and she no longer remembers, but that's a parent willing to go the distance right there, to snatch back your birthday party when you're acting a fool. I think it's the least we deserve right now. There was a tiny part of me that hoped the COVID-imposed timeout would have straightened us up a bit, make us come out of hibernation maybe with a tiny bit more humility in us … but nah, it just seemed to make us meaner. We came out swinging about masks, and vaccines, and how-dare-yous. I'll never understand that time in our history, but to see the revival of so much outright racism, the backward direction rights for women and minorities are going while rights for guns are expanding, mere days after the national shock of an elementary school shooting, is like stacking wood on a funeral pyre. For a country about to celebrate a national holiday that's all about freedom, it sure seems like everybody I know — and especially the ones who are counting it all as victories these days — feels less free than they ever have. Newly into his third term in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union address to Congress on a chill January morning. He knew his words would carry grave weight. At the time, Europe has essentially fallen to Hitler and Great Britain was desperately hanging in the balance. America wanted to stay content across the pond, but FDR knew the ramifications if Britain fell to the Reich. He spoke that morning — another Jan. 6 day at the Capitol — of the "four essential human freedoms" that all people, everywhere, should deserve. They are: freedom of speech, freedom to worship in one's way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The eloquence of his speech enraptured listeners and turned the heart of a nation. The famous "Four Freedoms" became the framing principles for the Atlantic Charter, signed by Winston Churchill and FDR that August, and the United Nations Declaration the following January. It was the groundwork for the creation of the UN, completing FDR's vision for the international organization after his death, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the UN, adopted in 1948 through the work of his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt. Freedoms change people. Ideas change history. Imagine this: on the 50th anniversary of the "Four Freedoms" speech in 1991, a bipartisan group of Congress held a ceremony to pay homage to the great work. In the Capitol, on Jan. 6. Images of a noose outside the Capitol on June 6, 2021 and would-be patriots carrying Confederate flags through its halls are the images we know now. Bad ideas change people, too. Abraham Lincoln once called our Declaration of Independence a "rebuke and a stumbling block to tyranny and oppression." Lincoln would know a thing about declaring independence. Under his watch, a whole other nation sprang forth from the country he was entrusted to run. Then he had to set free an entire race of people that the Declaration never thought to include. Of course, it would still be many more decades for women and other minorities to receive any rights, but like I said: Ideas change history and freedoms change people. Neither one can be held in your hand, but they're the most dangerous weapons in the world. Use them wisely. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.