The Mourning After: A Meditation on Freedom
free·dom
/ˈfrēdəm/ Noun the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom.
What exactly is Freedom? In America, this spectacular land of the free and home of the brave, what does freedom actually mean? Certainly, we can agree that actual freedom is not its dictionary definition. In this country, there are very few instances in which we are free to do exactly as we please, without hindrance or restraint.
Take travel, for example. As anyone who knows me well understands, I live for a good road trip. To me, meandering across the vast and varied landscape of this big beautiful country represents the ultimate freedom. But I understand the limits of my freedom. I might be free to get into my car and drive across the country, but I am compelled by law to obey the speed limits along the way. And to produce proof of insurance on demand. And to certify that my car’s emissions are at an acceptable level. And that I’ve registered said clean, insured vehicle with the state I live in. And, oh yeah, there’s this thing called a driver’s license that I have to acquire—and maintain—for all of time, if I want to drive across the country—or down the street to the store, for that matter.
Anyway, freedom. Who would have thought there could be so much red tape involved in the simple act of getting myself from one place to another? So many limitations on my precious freedom?
At some point, most of us come to realize that these limitations on our freedom are the price we pay for a safe, orderly society. But this realization doesn’t always happen overnight. I recall debates about seatbelt laws in the mid-1980’s. Many people in this country were outraged that the government would dare to peer inside our own private cars and require us to buckle up. And in 1985, when smoking on airplanes was still allowed, I can remember being on a flight to the West Coast and talking with a fellow passenger about the possibility that lighting up at 30,000 feet might soon be illegal. Impossible, my seatmate asserted, people will stop flying altogether if they can’t smoke on planes. It will undermine the travel industry completely. The government will never do it.
In retrospect, these examples seem ridiculous. Who could argue that a person’s right to smoke on a plane supersedes a plane-full of people’s right to breathe clean air? Or, that it is a bad idea to require people to wear seatbelts or to obey speed limits? And yet people did. And, conversely, who would have thought that we would have so quickly and unquestioningly given up so many civil liberties—freedoms, in fact—in the days just after 9-11 or that after just one episode of finding the makings of a bomb in the shoe of a would-be terrorist, millions of travelers would have to remove their shoes to get through security at the airport, even decades later?
Examples abound in our collective history: Americans are often compelled by law to relinquish certain freedoms, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes without question, when those freedoms increase the possibility of significant damage to the common good. Hence speed limits and seatbelt laws, child-proof drug packaging, smoking restrictions and taking off our shoes at the airport.
So, what about this freedom to bear arms? And, specifically, what about the freedom to bear assault rifles—a firearm designed, specifically, for the sole purpose of destroying a human body in a single burst of gunfire. For some reason, the same standards that we have applied to other questions of public safety in this country do not seem to apply here. Instead of immediately limiting this element that we can actually control after a deadly school shooting, we argue about the other elements: mental health issues, decaying family values and lack of effective security and training in schools. But, what about the guns? we teachers ask through tears and frustration. What about the access to these these military-style assault rifles? The ones that killed these innocent little children and our colleagues?
Maybe we don’t have to reach consensus to act. What if the answer is simply all of the above? What if we don’t have to agree on THE most important—the most egregious—factor in school shootings in America. Maybe we just have to agree that we have a terrible problem and that ALL of these factors contribute to it.
From here, we use our own history to light the way. We look back at the other times in our history that our government decided to limit the personal freedom of individuals for the safety and well-being of our society. We look closely at all the factors in this equation, the ones we can’t quite agree on, but we know add up to the sum of these tragic events—the mental health crisis in this country, the lack of effective school security and training and the easy access to guns, and specifically military-style assault weapons—and then we just decide, as a country and as a government, to do every single thing in our power to mitigate each of these factors.
Yes, it’s been challenging and expensive to modify schools so that they can be ready for the next one of these horrific events. And, believe me, those costs are nothing compared to the emotional and psychological costs to teachers and our students as we crouch in the corners of our classrooms during monthly lock down drills, thinking about how we might actually escape with our students should this happen to us, or we go to a mandatory faculty meeting in which we learn how to apply tourniquets and pack gunshot wounds. And, yes, as if this first aid training is not enough, we have been asked to become mental health experts. We do mental health check-ins with our students frequently, contact home regularly and monitor our students’ social and emotional well-being. As per state and federal mandates, we have become vigilant about preventing and responding to bullying and we routinely refer students for intervention when we’re concerned about them. In short, schools and teachers have changed everything in their power to prevent and respond to school shootings.
Now it’s time to address that last factor, the only one of these factors we haven’t yet modified, the elephant in the room: the access to guns—and specifically, the kind that have been used to commit so many of these heinous crimes against humanity. And yes, we understand that some gun owners will be upset if we infringe upon their freedom to own these guns—these military-style assault rifles. But, in the American tradition of doing what’s best for society, even when it infringes on people’s personal freedom, we feel confident that these people will survive. Just as people survived not smoking on planes. And being forced to wear seatbelts. And taking their shoes off at the airport.
I am hopeful that one day in the future I will be writing about that time in the early 2020’s that people argued against a ban on military-style assault weapons, even after those very same weapons were used to destroy the bodies of dozens of young children while they were at school. Seems ridiculous, right, that someone once argued that their freedom to own a gun was more important than the life of a child?
