Lafayette Lee
@Partisan_O
1. Sometimes I can't believe this is the same place grew up in. When I was a kid everybody recited that ancient American catechism: "It's a free country, isn't it?" But I can't remember the last time I heard it. These days it's halfway between a joke and an insult.
2. I miss what it feels like to be free... to not have a pair of eyes on my back and a pair of hands at my throat. I miss the days when I didn't have to remember a thousand lies to appease a thousand enemies who don't even know my name. I miss wild places.
3. Some years ago I worked in Africa and South America. I learned to love the rough-and-tumble nature of those places. Corruption was widespread, petty crime a given, and most people I knew were penniless- but there was also an exhilarating sense of freedom there
4. Authority is haphazard and arbitrary, and it pierces through the chaos at the strangest times- always when you least expect it- a sloppy police officer beats a pickpocket senseless, a swarm of bureaucrats arrive for a shakedown, you don’t have the proper stamp...
5. Order is always lurking somewhere in the chaos- it’s invisible and emanates from a strange cast of characters bound to one another by a million unspoken rules. Everyone knows the rules. And it keeps everything humming along, regardless of what some old parchment says...
6. Sometimes the freedom is so thick you can taste it- and it’s delicious... other times it knocks you down and steals your shirt. Every now and then I’d grow tired of the sweat, flies, noise, and muddle, and dream of hot showers, comfortable beds, and orderly queues
7. I’d want some of that good ole-fashioned American comfort with a side of orderliness. I'd daydream of endless rows of well-manicured lawns in the suburbs...
8. And yet here I am, dreaming of those wild places- Drowning in creature comforts and trying to recall what freedom tastes like. Authority is everywhere here. It stares you in the eye and glares up at you from the palm of your hand
9. Here order is cold, hard, and heavy, and it grips you like a pair of manacles. There is no invisible world. All the rules have been written. But even that doesn’t stop the optimists from pining, nor the elderly from remembering.
10. All the comfort and structure and certainty here came with a price, and it took endless war and a pandemic for the bill to come due. They finally showed us that beneath the endless leaves of parchment, there really wasn’t anything there.
11. But those rough-and-tumble backwaters are still humming along, problems and all- likely the same cast of characters moving and shaking. It will take more than a virus or a foreign war to defeat them- for freedom’s still in the air- maybe the last traces of it on earth.