The problem with politicians
(at least the well intentioned ones),
Is that they would dole out freedom,
By legislation or decree,
As if that were possible.
Oh, they offer gifts,
37 brands of toothpaste
(does any child dream of being a consumer?),
universal employment
(because enslavement seemed too negative),
or any one of a hundred other promises,
that may be good, may be bad,
but isn't freedom.
They say that Lincoln freed the slaves.
Freed them to Jim Crow?
Freed them to sharecropping?
Freed them to watch the corporate takeover
of the fourteenth amendment?
Freed them to go to northern cities,
where they could freeze and starve,
until the bosses needed strikebreakers?
Is that freedom?
Others claim that Lenin liberated the Russians,
but he'd tell you that liberty is a bourgeois conceit,
that the working class, the state, is all.
The individual is nothing.
Is this freedom?
And could you or I do any better?
Could we force people to be free
(whether they liked it or not),
or would we settle for forcing them to be good?
(good in our own image of course)
Would any call that freedom?
No, no one can give liberty,
It must be taken.
It cannot descend from Authority,
But must rise from its opposite,
from the spirit of revolt,
from the individual,
alone or in solidarity.
It is not the negation of others,
in its assertion of self,
but a claim of sovereign equality.
And even this is not freedom,
but its roots.
