  |  | ||||
| |||||
        | |||||
Our Cry For Liberty
By:
Date:
| |||||||||||||||
| Our Cry For Liberty | | |||||||||||||
By: | | Gerry Spence | | ||||||||||||
Date: | | 05/16/2000 | | ||||||||||||
| | | | ||||||||||||
|
| |
I ask you: Are you free? I say we are slaves. All of us. I ask you: Are you different from the many who secretly feel like slaves -- slaves to their jobs from which they cannot escape, slaves to a government that no longer serves them but to which they have become hopelessly indentured, slaves to a life that is beyond their control? "Are you free?" I asked a woman pounding at her computer. She was one of hundreds who occupied small cubicles that covered five floors, each floor larger than a gymnasium, acres of humans each at a small desk. She didn't look up when I spoke to her. "I haven't got time to talk to you," she said, still fixed on her screen. 'This computer records everything I do. If I stop it, tells on me. If I slow down it squeals on me. If I go to the bathroom, it makes a record of it. If I don't make my quota for the day, my name goes into the red zone. If it stays there a couple of days, someone else will be sitting here instead of me. I got kids. Am I free? Go away," she said. Then, as I left, she hollered after me. "Everybody in this country is free but me." "Are you free?" I recently asked a secretary working for the local telephone company. "I hate my job," she said. "Since the big downsizing, I'm doing the work of seven. Whatever anyone asks me to do I have to do, and I have to do it now, even if I am days behind in my regular work. Sometimes I'm so tired I want to fold up on the floor and cry." "Why don't you quit?" I asked. "This is a free country." "I can't quit," she said. "I only have seven years to retirement. And they can even fire you before your pension vests. Last week they laid off Melinda, who had worked for the company two years longer than me, and yesterday they hired a young girl right out of junior college to take her place." Then she said, as if she had said something wrong, "But this is the best country in the world." "Are you free?" I asked a worker at the cement plant. He shook the cement dust off his coveralls and pushed up his goggles. "Yeah," he said, "I'm free. But we haven't had a pay increase in four years. Working longer for less. Hard times in good times," he said. "Why don't you quit?" "Can't," he said. "We got our home here. Couldn't get our money out of it. Used to be a good town, but now it's gone to hell. Kids are in school. They don't want to leave. Wife's got a job. We probably couldn't find better jobs anywhere else. Besides, this is all I know." Then he pulled his goggles down and picked up his shovel. "Are you free?" I asked the manager of the hotel. He looked surprised. "What do you mean?" he asked. Then he said, "I like my work. Only thing is, I get moved around a lot: Last year they sold the company again, and I was sold along with it. Been in three cities in the last four years." "Must be hard on you," I said. "You get used to it," he said. "A person shouldn't complain. But it's hard on my wife. And the kids are always being yanked up by their roots." "Why don't you refuse to move? You're free, aren't you?" "I'm just another piece of furniture. I get sold with the hotel, the beds, the linens." He shook his head. "But I like my work." "Are you free?" I asked a government social worker. She wanted to make things better for the poor, and she wanted security for herself. "I'm as free as you," she said. She was spunky. "But we have to follow the regulations. Sometimes I feel like a robot. No room for spontaneity. And they're always cutting budgets. And besides that, we have a new director about every other year, and they are only interested in politics. Politics. Politics. It's disgusting. But one thing: I have security." "So does the polar bear in the zoo." "Don't be funny," she said. Then she looked at me strangely for longer than was comfortable. Suddenly she said, "I feel like the polar bear." "Are you free?" I asked a college student who was taking a course in business. "Sure," he said. "I take whatever classes I want. I'm free to choose my own career. " "Why are you taking business?" I asked. "Business is the thing nowadays. Good market for business majors in the corporate sector." "Does that mean you are preparing a product that you can sell on the open market?" "A product?" "Yes. You are the product. Do you think you will enjoy working for a corporation?" "I think so," he said. "They have a lot of benefits, and I'd like to run a big corporation someday." He cocked his head from side to side. "I want to be a big shot." Then he put his hands in his pockets and strode away in long bouncy steps. "Are you free?" I finally asked the CEO of a large food store chain. He was on the board of directors of three other major corporations. "Since you mentioned it, freedom at the top is bullshit," he said. 'The people who work here think I can do whatever I please. But I have stockbrokers to please. I have Wall Street to please. I have the fuckin' media to please. If they get on your case they can drive your stock to hell, and you go with it. "If I fire an incompetent worker, the government is on my ass for discrimination. If I fire some old bastards who have lost all incentive to do an honest day's work, I'm charged with age discrimination. You can't close the door in your office while your secretary's in there for fear you'll end up being hit with a sexual harassment suit. I have an open door policy: open door whenever there's a female around." He laughed. "Yes, I'm a slave -- the biggest fuckin' slave in the company." I say we are slaves. All of us. And in bewildering ways, our bondage is more pernicious than the slavery of old, for the New American Slave embraces the myth of his freedom as he would a dead puppy and, with all affection, speaks to it as if it were alive. Our nation was built on slavery, a house torn down by the great Civil War. But this new house, a house of mirrors, of secret rooms, of hidden passages -- indeed, a vastly more subtle and deluding structure -- has been built on the same malignant foundation. And today we live in this house, and we are all still slaves. Hear Goethe's warning. "No one is as hopelessly enslaved as the person who thinks he is free." And if we are the New American Slaves, who is our master? The New Master is an entanglement of megacorporations on the one hand and an omnipowerful national government on the other, each stuck to the other like a pair of copulating dogs, each unable to move without dragging the other behind it, each dependent upon the other, hating the other, but welded to the other in a dissolute enterprise. The New Master, a political and economic hybrid that was not invented to serve a free people, is driven by a gluttony unparalleled in human history. The power it produces is incalculable. Utterly fabricated to generate profit, it feeds off the people, digests the people, and excretes the people in a game of world domination in which profit is virtue and money is god. The New Master is mad. Like any unabashed heretic, I have an agenda. As I see it, we are in this together. I wish us all to be freed. But before we can free each other, we must first free ourselves. And how? In this book I offer recipes for our personal freedom that will invest each of us with the power to break out of the zoo. We shall discover how the mind constructs the cage but also opens the gate. We shall discover how, experiencing our new liberty, we can never be defeated. And we shall discover how to create a new paradigm for success, so that success is based not on the accumulation of great wealth, but on the acquisition of great personhood. But to free ourselves is not enough. I propose radical reform to reclaim America: We must take back the airways, the voice of the people, and create a new constitution for the twenty-first century. I propose a revolutionary method to finance elections. And, to save ourselves from the lies, the cheating, the unholy sellouts of self-seeking candidates, I propose the eventual abolishment of elections altogether. To replace them, I outline a means by which we can draft our representatives by lot, and by which we can create a Senate composed of the nation's finest minds and most evolved citizens, a pristine government to lead us at last to the promised land. I shall show how, in the New Free America, we can convert our corporate master to our willing slave. At the same time we shall discover how to retrain our lawyers to serve the people and how to select our judges so that they are no longer beholden to those who have elevated them. In the latter pages of the book, we shall revisit the looming threat of a new, fascism, the eerie shadow of which already darkens this great land. Yet, aware of that danger, and having been empowered to free ourselves the cry of Martin Luther King, Jr., can still become our cry: "Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" What I have to say will surely anger many. Indeed, within these pages one should find something to anger everyone, else I shall have failed. But my intent has not been to anger. My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others. This book, then, is a manual for freeing the self, and an invitation to join with one another in creating a new free nation for the twentyfirst century. It is a cry exhaled out of love for the walking dead. It is a battle plan for a nation anesthetized under promises long ago proven fraudulent, a call to Americans to awaken and rise, up from under the decaying shrouds of myth and to one day inhale the bright, brisk air of liberty. Gerry Spence Jackson Hole, Wyoming | | | ||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
