Experiencing Freedom
When we think of freedom, I would imagine most Americans think of pivotal events such as Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, the militiamen fighting off the British at Lexington Green, or perhaps memories from childhood of family celebrating and worshiping the Lord as they understand Him. By contrast, when we think of tyranny, it’s usually equally as bold and striking an image that comes to mind. Perhaps Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin suppressing voices of dissent and centralizing their regime’s power. Images like this, burned in our childhood memories from school teachers explaining how these events unfolded, or perhaps from Grandparents who served in the Second World War explaining how these things could possibly have happened in a modern, civilized country. While these age-appropriate explanations were genuine and given in love, they perhaps glossed over how slowly and incrementally they unfold.
The reality is that It might be an unexpected change in requirements for a permit or license. It might be in the subtle tone of a police officer betraying the hidden reason for the traffic stop. It might be a sudden visit from a Code Enforcement Officer, asking about the way a hedge was trimmed or flag was flown. This is how tyranny begins. It doesn’t start with a gas chamber, or a house-to-house search for weapons stolen from an armory in the dead of winter. It starts with some easily explained-away infringement upon basic human rights that a population has begun to take for granted…rights that have been enshrined in our Bill of Rights after having been recognized as inherent in our existence as basic and essential to all humanity, regardless of where you stand. Each of us carries these small, seminal moments in the back of our minds…for us as individuals, these experiences are seared in our consciousness, and we recall them in vivid color, reliving the experience in the foundation of our souls when someone relates a similar experience.
Sometimes, when someone we know and trust to be an honorable person relates their personal experiences of tyranny, it sounds foreign to our ears, like it must have been a misinterperetation. Perhaps it sounds like something from a novel, like they were describing a script from a made-for-television drama. For that person, their experience clearly affected them in a deeply personal way. We try to put ourselves in their shoes, and imagine being in the situation, but the futility becomes evident. Today I had that very experience. Today I spoke with a friend of mine at church, who related to me some of the experiences of growing up in Hungary under Communism. She spoke of beloved family members who spent years of their lives in Siberian gulags, and of breadlines. In my mind, I pictured a scene from the 1940’s…but the woman relating these experiences was the same age as my own sisters, and these events took place while my sisters were teasing their hair and blaring rock music through their boom-boxes in the late 1980’s. I remember these times. I remember watching the Berlin wall come down, and seeing the faces of people on television experiencing that pivotal moment, not just in their own lives, but in the lives of their family members. The tears streaming down their faces as they kissed and hugged one another and celebrated every stroke of a sledgehammer to that God-forsaken wall…
As my friend related the events of her childhood, tears began to well up and I become choked with emotion as I imagined my own sisters in her shoes. I imagined my beloved sisters standing in line for hours in a blizzard while waiting for a single loaf of bread to feed our family for a week. That’s not an allegory or rubber-stamp rhetoric, it actually happened to my friend. Suddenly,with the images in my mind from those television broadcasts of East Germans finally standing on top of that wall, I realized that it wasn’t about the wall itself. The wall symbolized a lifetime of deeply personal experiences of tyranny for every single person on that wall. As the sledgehammers struck blow after blow, each of those people were likely remembering these experiences, and they cheered because these experiences would never happen again to their children or their children’s children. It was finally over.
They had finally experienced liberty.