Life and Liberty
The Dream of Freedom
Maybe it was because I grew up in a different time and place. The Midwest, so quiet, before smartphones destroyed the youth with their late night bleary-eyed TikTok craze. Back in those days, we worried about where the next party was, who was getting the beer, and what girls would show up.
We had the freedom to do what we wanted. We had the liberty to pursue happiness. Life was simpler in many ways, different people lived together without tearing each other’s heads off. We stayed to ourselves, bothered no one, and no one bothered us. The perfect freedom.
Maybe I look back on this age of innocence with too much nostalgia, imagining a world that is only half true. Maybe so. But that’s my freedom to do so.
How could I describe this time over two decades ago, the age of The Millennial growing up Midwest?
I guess I could describe this type of upbringing and long-forgotten world with three words.
A River
A Road
A Church
That sums up the forgotten American life. The perfect life.
Hot summer nights, a gaggle of cars gathered underneath a lone streetlamp in a dark parking lot. Fights, rivalry, love, all of it mixed together, all us together living life in that little town, wonderfully oblivious to the outside world and it’s so called troubles.
Now that’s what I call growing up Midwest. I dream about those long ago days. Parties in long-forgotten oak groves, long days hunting and fishing, exploring a river, driving those endless gravel roads in search of something new.
Each lonesome average with that tall lonesome farmhouse had a story to tell that was decades old. Generations have lived and died in those same fields, under that same roof, telling the same stories.
When it’s a quiet Saturday night and I sit around a fire with the sun setting, sipping on a cup of hot tea … I wonder what happened to the world. Did all the generations that came before me feel the same way? Yearning for the past that will never come back?
I dream of the freedom that once was.
The American Revolution and Freedom
Recently I’ve been listening to one of the best podcasts around, History That Doesn’t Suck, you’re missing out if you don’t know what I’m talking about. They’ve been slowly working their way through the American Revolution, life before and during those fateful events.
The Boston Tea Party was a significant event in American history that occurred on December 16, 1773. It was a political protest by the American colonists against the British government and the British East India Company, which controlled all the tea imported into the colonies.
Now every time I sip that tea I think of those beleaguered and oppressed soon-to-be Americans not taking it anymore. Throwing that tea. Saying give me my freedom or give me death.
The world today makes me want to throw my tea. I’m not sure where I would throw it, maybe in my backyard.
People simply aren’t nice anymore, more than that, they are full of hatered towards those who are not like them. It seems like everyone want’s to take someone else’s freedom, tell them how to live, what to do, what to believe.
Life is more complicated now.
It isn’t that simple anymore, not in this world driven by X (Twitter) and all the information, right and wrong, that never ceases to fly around the interwebs of bits and bytes. We seem to live in an age where one could easily ask … “What is freedom,” and “Who’s freedom are we talking about?”
No one agrees about anything anymore. It's not even close.
Politics these days have made that clear, what two people think is Freedom could not be farther apart. Or are they?
Can we both agree that the pursuit of happiness and freedom is something we should all strive for? Can we find common ground, we who see cultural questions differently, in this age of bitterness and vitriol? Where it seems like people cannot even co-exist together if they don’t agree on everything.
If you would have told me this world would exist 20 years ago when I was sitting in the back of a pickup truck with a gun and a spotlight, not bothering anyone, and having the time of my life … I wouldn’t believe it.
That’s what I want this ramble of writings to come to explore.
Liberty and Tea.