NOTICING Unalienable Rights

Nov 12

In every single person on every inch of earth

I dunno. I am a Jewish woman. Secular, like Passover. I am bonded to the promise of freedom for every single person on every inch of earth. At least, that’s how I practice it. Born privileged by luck’s chance wheel to be white in America. A hair breadth’s within both grandfather’s pogroms on two different continents. I came of age during the age of Mad Men, so what do I know?

But is it possible, with complete and profound respect, that no matter gender, color, race, or caste — except for the one percent, maybe, we are all now—everyone one of us—about to live under the despotic powers of Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, the fires raging at the Rock Springs Massacre, and the fury of the Zootsuit Riots? The camps of Americans interned. The Ghost Dancers slaughtered at Wounded Knee. I howl.

Only one gender, including queer, is governed under a meaner rule of thumb. I regret to tell you, Abigail Adams, the ladies are still forgotten! Think of the women and girls trapped in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory’s flames by profit’s rapacious methods. The steel exit doors were bolted shut. Do you hear their screams? They jumped out of windows. Do you hear the sound of their bodies hitting ground? Under law and contract rules the factory’s owners got off scott free, and made a piece of change to boot. Today, under threat of law, before a doctor is allowed to do what must be done during the terror of miscarriage, pregnant women are condemned to wait, wait! until the fetal heartbeat stops. Us childless mothers grieve for the these inconsolable mothers.

One facet of America’s jewel displays vitality. We do help one another raise the barn.

Another facet deep-sixes fellowship by the means that glorifies the cowboy stories of individualism. Who sees the tragic consequences exalting self-reliance? What government structures animates mutual support?

On that dulled morning of November 10, 2016, I realized that only they who know in their bones, generation after generation after generation on American soil, only they, having suffered constitutional obliterations of legal freedoms know the heartbeat of the unalienable right to freedom. Their lived experience demonstrates to us, the privileged who have never known the strange fruit of weird ideas, know how to resist, navigate and change laws and policies. Think about it. From the ratification of the US Constitution in 1788 it took 132 years for men and women—just white women, mind you—to get universal suffrage in 1920. It took another 44 years for Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color to get to their vote in 1964.

But then, just about yesterday, our country’s highest court blasted that civil right to vote into submission. The south’s most populous are kept in line by the trick of legal mind’s logic. Still, the Founding Fathers had and has to date, the last word. How does the Electoral College square with one person, one vote?

The astonishing and true fact is this: human born unalienable rights cannot be taken away. They cannot be given! Why? Because they are inseparable from breath, the first breath of every single baby born. When we remember that our in-born freedom is always in us, we are able to cut free from man-made government chains.

I go outside to rake autumn’s gorgeous treasure and spot yard signs up and down the street. I can’t yet take mine down. I can barely look at today’s headline, November 6, 2024. Sweet Jesus, this hurts.

The bluest eye. Who has suffered deliberative laws creating inhumane loneliness, anguished longing, outraged madness—one way or another—that the bluest eye represents?

As it sometimes happens, ancestors living under brutal mantles delivered stellar individuals who herself, himself and themselves, stepped forward to the public stage in salutary leadership. They lead now. Across time, numbers of us joined them then. Recall the Muslim Ban. Recall the family separations. Some still are. Separated. Dear god, who remembers the callousness to keep accurate records of those kidnapped? Who keeps track of the Jokester’s lazy? The Jokester who could not care less.

I do. We do! Together we will make vibrant and solid the unalienable—impossible to deny—right to freedom from this moment’s nightmare of tyranny. We have overcome. We will overcome more.

Kamala Harris made proof-evident sense when she told us that when it is darkest, stars are the brightest. Good trouble made in response to the First Grab by Columbus has never stopped. The grab of private parts are personal and political. Making good trouble will never stop.

Gather the threads of our history. Own them. These evident truths are the songs of harmonies eager to be heard. Unbounded by selfish algorithms. We’ve got rhythms resonant with the common good.

We will sing a fresh new page into song about America for America.

Do you hear it?

Word. The truth is, on earth we are briefly gorgeous.

We are belting out our absolute unalienable right to freedom.

__________________

Notes:

Daniel J. Siegel MD, IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) (W.W. Norton 2022)

Mary Gordon, Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child, (The Experiment 2009)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Men

Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (W.W. Norton 2010)
https://time.com/4573211/donald-trump-november-ninth/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

https://cherokeehistorical.org/trail-of-tears/

https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/september-02/

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/zoot-suit-riots-and-wartime-los-angeles

http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.war.056

https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760331aa

https://baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/disasters/fires-triangle_shirtwaist.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb#:~:text=A%20modern%20folk%20etymology%20relatesthicker%20than%20a%20man's%20thumb.

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/01/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-abortion-ban-emtala/