Opinion

Freedom is not free

By Joe Johnson
Online Journal Contributing Writer

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September 27, 2005—The right wing's shibboleth, "Freedom is not free," if we are to grant it any meaning outside its obvious political and propaganda intent, seems especially applicable to today's arrest of Cindy Sheehan.

Cindy Sheehan was arrested carrying a photo of her son in his Army uniform with hundreds of protesters who marched around the White House and then down the two-block pedestrian walkway on Pennsylvania Avenue. When they reached the front of the White House, dozens sat down—knowing they would be arrested—and began singing and chanting "Stop the war now!"

Police warned them three times that they were breaking the law by failing to move along, and then began making arrests. Cindy Sheehan was the first taken into custody. She was carried to the curb, then stood up and walked to a police vehicle while protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching."

Of course, Cindy Sheehan was not merely loitering or disobeying a municipal regulation on assembly, she was practicing civil disobedience.

Here is Henry David Thoreau on civil disobedience, for those, like Bill O'Reilly or Matthew Drudge or the reactionary right who will assuredly condemn this act out of hand. They will call it cunning political manipulation, or crass politicking, no doubt. But they should remember their own shibboleth, monotoned from their carefully guarded strip on 15th street yesterday where the pro-war faction cowered behind a neat blue line of Darth Vader DC cops: "freedom is not free." Indeed it is not. And the freedom to call our chief executive and his henchmen to account might require quite a few more arrests than a single person. I would suggest that 60 percent of this nation may well have to be put under lock and key before the neocons and the reactionary right wakes from their dream of power; before they understand that they cannot any longer drown our cities with impunity, and murder our sons and daughters with impunity, or steal from the wealth of our nation with impunity.

I offer Henry David Thoreau's quite principled account of his own civil disobedient action with regard to our ignominious activity in the Mexican War as an instruction for those who may want to emulate Cindy Sheehan's action today.

"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn."

Courage has a name in this country: Cindy Sheehan. The reactionary right mocks that which it fears and does not understand. History will judge their ineffable ignorance accordingly, but we can judge it now in real time. What fools those princes of media who ignored the little dark man in loincloth who insisted on doing his own weaving. What fools the Limbaugh listeners who would have called Martin Luther King an uppity nigger in his day. What fools the Bill O'Reilly's and Matthew Drudge's contemptible spin, flaying uselessly about the impotence of that sad mom getting busted. Their time will come. In the meanwhile, for those with ears to hear, listen: if Cindy Sheehan is a crazy loiterer then Martin Luther King was a womanizing vagrant and Gandhi was a half-witted hobo.

Indeed, freedom is not free: it occasionally requires the blood of a conscience pierced by the sins of a nation. What you are hearing is the disquieting sounds of our country's conscience bleeding.