64. “Freedom"

 One day after quarantine  

I’m home again, had a nice steak dinner with my two grandsons, who’ve safely quarantined here while I was doing so at a friend’s cabin. The grandson who tested positive and set this whole thing in motion had a few days of mild symptoms, but is healthy now. We’ll have turkey on Thursday, quietly.

This morning the radio news said that a million people each day are crowding into airports and airplanes going somewhere else for Thanksgiving. A piece in the Washington Post profiled a more conservative cross-section of Americans who are making accommodations—space heaters in patios, individual serving plates, zoom Thanksgivings. One woman said her husband would not be joining a smaller, masked group for the traditional dinner because he was “grumpy” that his presidential candidate had lost, and refused to agree to the precautions for the holiday meal.

My first thoughts were with the millions who are traveling, and then to the woman’s husband and the red-hatted people,who’ve become ubiquitous on TV with shouts for “freedom”: freedom to go on eating, drinking, and celebrating—and traveling—like they did in some idealized past. 

What do those freedoms have to do with the Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and the Freedom Marchers we watched on TV last night as I described the Civil Rights movement and the leaders I’d followed and idolized to my grandson! John Lewis wanted the freedom to vote, without having to correctly guess the number of jellybeans in a jar or reciting parts of the constitution. Nelson Mandela waited 27 years in prison for the freedom to participate in the life of his country without the walls of apartheid.

How do you measure those freedoms with the freedom to travel and crowd and breathe close and sing in choruses when solos are healthier and your own freedoms might infringe on the health and lives of others?

Say “freedom” once, twice, and the third time “Me and Bobby Maggee” rung in my ears. And freedom shrunk to a nostalgic hunger for something gone…

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

Nothin', that's all that Bobby left me, yeah

But, feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues

Hey, feelin' good was good enough for me, mm-hmm

Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee

# # #