Frederick Douglass and freedom

As I reflect, today, on the challenges to freedom, the waste laid by the stubborn unwillingness of those desperately rationalizing power, and the burdens that has created for my own life, as a teacher, I thought about the American slave turned civil rights leader, Frederick Douglass.

I thought about Douglass because he was a man who also passionately sought his own freedom and failed escape from slavery twice for seeking it (once from a brutal slavemaster, Edward Covey, whom Douglas was rented to for a year to break his spirit as a young teenager and undoubtedly offered up brutal abuse when Douglass was returned to him).

Douglass had this to say about the question of what whites in America should do with African Americans, that I think applies just as well to what any person should treat any other person:

"Everybody has asked the question. . .'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!"

There are exceptions to that principle, obviously. We can and should protect one another when we are facing imminent violence and look after one another when we face harm. There is much common sense on such questions.

But controlling one another is hardly noble. And doing so and claiming to celebrate freedom is a lie. And it is not a noble lie. It is the oldest and most pernicious ignoble lie, in fact.

And Frederick Douglass knew the fact of that lie in his life better than most of us alive today.