Living with the Long Emergency: Truckers, freedom, and interbeing – Brattleboro Reformer
The Canadian Freedom Convoy that was protesting government mandated vaccination is but the latest instance of U.S. right-wing influenced attempts to discredit and eventually destroy democracy. According to a story in the Feb. 16 Washington Post, almost all Canadian truckers are vaccinated and reportedly prominent leaders of the convoys are not truckers themselves, but right-wing instigators, instead.
Interestingly, while the large majority of Canadians oppose the Freedom Convoy, and are vaccinated, the truckers are supported by white supremacist groups, and U.S. Republicans such as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and anti-democratic social media figures such as Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk, who have encouraged similar actions in American cities. More than 55 percent of the donations for the truckers coming from the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo originate in the United States.
Unfortunately, while the yearning to be free is a legitimate desire of the human species, its expression is often at the expense of anothers freedom, and used to disguise its repressive purpose. As the good people of Ottawa could tell us, there is freedom, and then there is freedom. In the name of the latter, they have had to endure the freedom of the truckers clogging their streets and disrupting their lives, making their sleep impossible by running their engines late at night, befouling their air with their noxious diesel fumes, ripping the protective masks off the faces of citizens and refusing to wear masks when entering businesses that require them, and committing other uncivil acts against people who have nothing to do with their complaints against the governments mandated vaccines.
What is occurring in Ottawa in the name of freedom, however, is all too common on a much larger scale in our civilization where it is often invoked to justify and conceal displays of domination, abuse, and control. Just ask people of color, indigenous folks, almost any woman, certainly children, people deemed unacceptable because of their sexual, political, religious, etc. orientations, not to mention Mother Nature, herself. White skin privilege, male domination, adult ageism, heterosexual tyranny, and species dominion are all examples of the exercise of power-over committed by one human being against another in the name of the perpetrators freedom.
This freedom is the domain of ego. It is I-centered, Me First in its nature and expression. It is the freedom of an illusory Self, which allows us to entertain the fantasy we are independent of and separate from the rest of life, without responsibility or accountability to any other living being. It is the freedom to do what this fictional I wants, regardless of the consequences for others, the freedom that Donald Trump has glorified and legitimized in his wanton exhibition of extreme narcissism.
It is also in its name that there has emerged in our country an organized effort to overthrow democracy, currently through the obstructionist use of the filibuster by Republicans in the Senate, the storming of the Capitol by Trump insurrectionists, and the disenfranchising of voters through state laws. These acts diminish, not enhance citizens freedom, aiding a minoritarian regime to come to power over the majority.
Ultimately, the litmus test as to whether the call for freedom is camouflage for oppression, or is, in fact, the real deal, is if it recognizes that freedom does not exist in any meaningful way unless it is rooted in our inherent interconnection and interdependence with the rest of life. This is freedom that is informed by a consciousness that none of us would be alive beyond the moment of our births if it wasnt for our mothers and fathers, friends and teachers, farmers and truckers, mail deliverers and garbage haulers, factory workers and office workers, water and soil, air and sun, bees and worms, plants and animals oh, the list is endless that we are so absolutely dependent upon for our brief stay on this planet, but about which too many of us are both mindlessly unaware and ungrateful.
To be conscious of this intimate relationship we have with each other and the rest of life is to live a freedom of interbeing, to use Thich Nhat Hanhs felicitous expression. Without ego to circumscribe either our vision or hearts, it is a freedom of such boundless space that it is inclusive of everyone and everything, hence responsible to all.
In so being, such consciousness allows us to be an untethered expression of our inherent capacity for compassion, kindness, generosity, and love, true to the person of heart we are meant to be. This is adult freedom, the freedom of a spiritually mature person who developmentally is no longer subject to the selfish demands of I.
Interestingly, it is also the freedom that opposes mandates to accomplish this purpose, recognizing that they, and its agency, the State, are counter-productive to instilling the sense of freedoms responsibility that is only learned when we grow up, and accept that were all in this business of life together.
Tim Stevenson is a community organizer from Athens with Post Oil Solutions, and author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (2015, Green Writers Press). The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media.
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Living with the Long Emergency: Truckers, freedom, and interbeing - Brattleboro Reformer