Over the last few years, the Fellowship Church ministers have shared from the depths of their soul messages about the meanings of Independence Day including excerpts from Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July.” I count it the most profound statement I have read regarding the special day when this nation was born. He speaks unsparingly and passionately about the hypocrisy within its borders, hypocrisy in its inception and contemporary life. If you have not read the speech, please do so.
The initial thoughts for today’s message do not have lofty origins. Fireworks have been splitting the air at least occasionally in my neighborhood for probably the last month. While disturbed by them, it was the night of the fourth that seized my nerves. There were waves upon waves of noisy sounds and displays of brilliant light blasting the gentleness of the night. The onslaught continued until 3 am at least. Fireworks are illegal in Alameda County where I live. Cities have approved displays of fireworks. The Oakland police force with all its drones and other methods of capturing criminals seems impotent year after year to prevent this out-of-control annual display of disrespect of neighbors, animals, and potential fire hazards. There was a wildfire in San Jose that authorities stated could have resulted from the fireworks. Every fifth of July we have to sweep or rake debris from our house due to the fireworks. I was disturbed by my seeming negativity and pettiness. Was there a theological or spiritual basis for my discontent?
Reading A Strange Freedom, Dr. Thurman's book, Inward Journey, spoke to me.
"It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men without a sense of anchor anywhere. Always there is the need of mooring, the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted and will not give. The urge to be accountable to someone, to know that beyond the individual himself there is an answer that must be given, cannot be denied. The deed a man performs must be weighed in a balance held by another’s hand. The very spirit of a man tends to panic from the desolation of going nameless up and down the streets of other minds where no salutation greets and no friendly recognition makes secure. It is a strange freedom to be to be adrift in the world of men."
When we were children, we participated in limited and supervised fireworks. The fireworks were done in a community where there was a sense of accountability, not by anonymous entities. We were rooted in relationships with neighbors who would not bombard us continuously through the night. We held each other in balance. Today, I am not sure that people are setting off fireworks. The community existed before and beyond the Fourth of July demonstrations. It is sad that disturbing neighborhoods is how some celebrate the birth of the nation. This a not an expression of freedom. Instead, it is license to do as I please adrift in the world. The firing of fireworks that I have experienced comes not from a sense of community but is a violation of community. During the display, with its noise, I wondered how people in war zones could stand the sound and fury of missiles splitting and exploding above and around them. It is madness. It is insanity.
It is the freedom of choice that keeps our soul alive. Additionally, it is our desire and ability to take responsibility for our deeds despite extenuating circumstances that give us true liberation.
Building Freedom
In the Twentieth Anniversary edition of his Freedom Dreams, Robin G. D. Kelley writes “It is not enough to imagine a world without oppression. We must understand the mechanisms that reproduce and naturalize exploitation and subjugation.”
Mutual Aid. My daughter, Elleza Kelley, taught me to look for freedom dreams in the spaces of enclosure and fugitivity. Her scholarship explores how Black communities transformed plantations, ghettos, rooftops, prisons, and the like, into commons, spaces of fugitive praxis and mutual care. She first schooled me on the importance of mutual aid as a potentially radical practice of prefiguring the future we want to build. The irony, of course, is that my mother modeled a practice of mutual aid and passed it down to us. I even hinted at it in Freedom Dreams when I wrote that my mother raised us “to help any living creature in need, even if that meant giving up our last piece of bread. Strange, needy people always passed through our house, occasionally staying for long stretches of time.” What I understood as values or a moral duty, Elleza helped me see as political practice. Abolitionist and legal scholar Dean Spade also helped me see mutual aid as an essential ingredient for revolution, since it is fundamentally about building solidarity and practicing a culture of collective care in lieu of a neoliberal culture of individualism and the market.
Негізгі бет Message (Choices and Community Building Radical Future) from Dr. Blake read by Dr. Benton
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