Unwinding America, land of the unfree

The Collins dictionary defines “free” as “someone or something that is not restricted, controlled or limited, for example by rules, customs or other people”. So, which countries could we assert are free?

Some may point to Russia and a few of its ex-satellites as examples of unfree states. Others would say North Korea, Uganda, Syria, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. But few would think of the US as not being a free country. Why not?

Some journalists and many Americans like to call the US president the “leader of the free world”, with which I disagree on both counts: leader and free. The country isn’t that free, and it certainly isn’t leading the world. There are plenty of restrictions inside the US itself. For instance, abortion is banned in many places, and the rich have control over the poor.

Sure, there are freedoms in America. But it’s far from the idealised version many people imagine. Getting pulled over sometimes ends up with someone dying, usually a darker-skinned American.

When I arrived there in the early 1980s to further my studies, I saw first-hand some of the freedoms my friends were so used to they didn’t even consider them freedoms: no fences between and among neighbours; the mailbox on the street at the start of the driveway; calling on a public phone required you to make the call, hang up, wait for the operator to ring back and say how much you owed, and then you dropped enough quarters into the coin slot. An immense freedom.

I must admit that I sometimes fled the scene after having made my call. I also first met collect calling (reverse-charge calling) in the United States of America.

Killed, watched, grouped

But what kind of freedoms are those when people are still getting lynched, or being racially profiled? The killing in February 2020 of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was chased and fatally shot by three white men while he was out jogging in Glynn County, Georgia, is more than just akin to lynching. And then there was George Floyd, and there was Eric Garner. And many more. All black.

The US does have privacy laws, but with all the surveillance programmes and data tracking by the government and private companies, that right gets trampled on all the time.

And do not even mention affordable healthcare. In America you’re not even free to get sick. There’s no freedom from going bankrupt over medical bills.

And there’s no freedom from dying in a mass shooting. The Second Amendment says: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s that word “free” again. Isn’t it harder, though, to feel free when safety is not always there?

Gerrymandering is when political parties mess with the boundaries of voting districts to give themselves an edge. This can lead to unfair elections, where certain groups of voters either get packed into one area or spread out across different ones, making their votes count much less.

A prime example happened in North Carolina in 2016. After the 2010 census, Republicans, who oversaw redrawing the map, created districts that hurt Democratic voters. They either crammed them into a few overwhelmingly Democratic areas or split them up across Republican-heavy districts. Even though the state was evenly split, Republicans won 10 of the 13 seats.

The courts later ruled the map unconstitutional, calling it a clear case of partisan gerrymandering.

Axis of evil

Poems have been written about that vast, beautiful, complicated world. “Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free,” sings Langston Hughes in Let America Be America Again.

And according to the voice in Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus: “Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand / A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name / Mother of Exiles.” Noble words struggling for survival in ignoble times.

America has never really lived up to its ideals, and that’s a shame because the country’s constitution is good. I live in France now and, although it is smaller and less monetarily rich, France is freer. And it is secular. That’s a massive difference right there.

It is a pity that a certain quota of the US bans books and wants to hang the Christian 10 Commandments on classroom walls. As a reminder, there are Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs and non-believers in the United States of America.

“Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by Israeli soldiers... during ground operations in Gaza,” US foreign minister Israel Katz said. “This is a significant military and moral achievement for Israel and a victory for the entire free world against the axis of evil of radical Islam led by Iran.”

But he did not explain what he meant by “free world” or “axis of evil”. In 2016, $38-billion was agreed on as US military aid to Israel over 10 years. What kind of leader of any free world does that?

As I write this, that aid by the leader of the free world is killing Palestinians and Lebanese indiscriminately. DM

Rethabile Masilo is a Mosotho poet from Lesotho who lives in Paris, France.

Precedent

By Rethabile Masilo

When people, captured in Africa partly by the sword,
partly by The Word, leapt from the Jesus of Lübeck
near the coast of San Juan de Ulúa, to go back home,
a sun glistened off their backs just before
they got picked out like ducks at a shooting gallery.

As children we crossed Mohokare to go and pick peaches
and apricots on the other side, loam-fed fruit
watered by cloudbursts of the eyes of men
who fought invasions, as spring turned winter into growth again.
We broke branches to use as rafts on the way back,
but the Boer, who always dashed at us with a gun,
never shot us but let us bobble home with our loot.

Maybe unlike John Hawkins he had no belief in apartheid.
Perhaps the river tied our worlds enough for him to value
the spirit of its flow. Either that, or he knew the history
of the first ship to take folks to America: the first time
black people were shot in the back trying to get away.

America

By Claude McKay

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.