May I Speak Freely?

The sun came up this morning with a pink so loud it practically needed its own soundtrack. I’m not exaggerating … we get skies up here in the Adirondacks that look like somebody spilled a watercolor set across the whole sky and then apologized by making it even prettier.

Myth or Truth

There’s an old story about the Hudson River School painters getting raked over the coals by critics who said their Adirondack skies were too vivid to be real … that no sky on earth looked like that. The painters swore up and down they were just painting what they saw. Sitting on this porch with my coffee this morning, I’m inclined to take their side. Something about a million protected acres, no smokestacks, and enough altitude to get you a little lightheaded apparently makes for a sky that looks like it’s showing off. I don’t know the science. I just know I believe the painters now — and I never believed anybody who said their fish was “this big.”

Close Neighbors

Speaking of the porch … it’s a good one. Screened in, looking out over the lake, and this morning the houses that were dead quiet a week ago are suddenly full of racket. Good racket. Laughter carrying clean across the water like the people are sitting in the chair next to you instead of a quarter mile away. Somebody’s having breakfast. Somebody’s easing a canoe out before the water skiers show up and turn the lake into a washing machine. It’s the sound of a holiday waking up.

Three Generations

My own Fourth of July memories start on Lake Wahbasee in Indiana, where we were third-generation lake people before “lake people” became a personality trait you see on T-shirts. My father and his grandfather used to sit for hours in an old metal rowboat, fishing and presumably solving none of the world’s problems but enjoying the attempt. My grandparents eventually parked their Airstream on a lot across from the lake, and years later traded it in for a little cottage. My folks followed suit and bought our first family place when I was 16.

Family Gathering

Everybody came for the Fourth. Both sets of grandparents, cousins by the carload, my brothers, friends who just showed up because word got around. We ate hot dogs, baked beans, and my grandmother’s secret potato salad … a recipe nobody has ever successfully duplicated, though I will go to my grave insisting it had a full cup of sugar in it and she just never admitted it.

Scattered Family

I cherish that memory every single Fourth of July, and I have never once managed to recreate it, because everybody’s scattered now and getting a crowd like that together has gotten a lot harder. Yesterday we had just one of our three kids here, who pulled off a small miracle escaping work for a couple of days. The other two couldn’t make it. That’s just how it goes now.

Freedom Recognized

Here’s the thing about freedom … I never really appreciated it. It was just there. Teachers talked about it in school. It got mentioned in speeches. TV pundits always talked about it. But when something is always there, it stops registering as remarkable..

A Fresh Viewpoint

Turns out, freedom is remarkable … I just needed to see its absence to recognize it.

That started for me on a trip to Czechoslovakia, visiting my wife’s family during the height of communism. It was an eye-opener in the worst way. Life was hard, everyone struggling, everyone afraid. Neighbors curried favor with the government by turning in neighbors. People simply vanished for the crime of pushing back on a local official. No trial. Gone forever. Our family there couldn’t trust anyone, because saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could cost you everything.

A later trip to Russia reinforced it. Even after communism officially fell, the fear hadn’t fully left the culture. Nothing like the Soviet era, but the residue was still there. And Cuba was worse than all the others combined.

A Bad Example

One artist I met told me about his father, also a painter, who refused to paint the propaganda version of Russian life he was ordered to paint. Instead he painted the truth of what he saw. After one especially pointed piece, he was arrested and executed. His crime was having an opinion the government didn’t approve of. That was the biggest eye-opener for me, meeting a contemporary who was impacted while I was alive. Not past history, but very real and in my face. 

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to a lot of corners of the world, and more than a few people who’ve lived through the loss of their freedoms have quietly told me the same thing: America is showing some of the same early warning signs they saw before things went sideways where they lived. Protect it at all costs, they warn.

Experts once predicted a republic like ours couldn’t survive a hundred years. We’re 250 years in. Good job, everyone. 

Alarming Trends

It’s sobering to watch places like the United Kingdom criminalize opinions and statements of fact on social media, relabeled as “hate speech” by whoever’s holding the microphone that year. Seeing “regular people” go to prison for sharing an opinion is something I never thought I’d see, especially there. Some countries have made it illegal to quote certain Bible scriptures out loud, with imprisonment to follow. 

Where That Leaves Us

America has plenty of flaws. Our leaders have always been human and flawed. But the fact that we’re allowed to say so … loudly, publicly, without a knock on the door at 2 a.m. … is not a small thing. Freedom is not normal in most of human history, and it’s still not normal in most of the world today.

Sadly, political differences are breaking up friendships and families, because it’s become the norm to ghost anyone you disagree with rather than just disagree with them. I applaud anyone standing for what they believe … but it’s a slippery slope when we stop allowing discussion or discourse altogether. Families have disagreed over politics since the founding of this great land, for 250 years running. Losing that ability would be a tragedy.

And honestly, that’s kind of what a family reunion like July 4th is all about. Every year we seem to argue about something … politics, or that potato salad recipe. Half the family swears it’s a cup of sugar, the other half insists Grandma would never slip sugar in, and nobody has ever once produced the actual recipe card to settle it. We’ve been loudly, cheerfully wrong about that potato salad for decades, and not one person has ever been arrested for their opinion on it.

In a Nutshell

That’s the whole deal, right there. A free country is just a big, messy family reunion where everybody’s allowed to be loudly wrong about something … family recipes, politics, the neighbor’s fireworks starting too early, the color to paint the house, or the way our kids are being taught. Nobody gets hauled off for it. Nobody disappears for saying the sky looked pink and someone else insisting it looked orange.

We got 250 years out of an experiment nobody thought would last a hundred. That’s not an accident, but it’s not a guarantee. We all hold responsibility for the maintenance job, and every one of us is on the crew. So argue about everything. Just don’t let anybody convince you that arguing is the problem. Silencing other opinions is the problem. Use the freedom while you’ve got it, and don’t let it go quiet on your watch.

Eric Rhoads