Now in its seventh decade, Slab City is a longstanding but chronically impermanent settlement built on Camp Dunlap, a decommissioned World War II training camp. It is an informal community of squatters, snowbirds, homeless residents, veterans, and artists like Austin, all making their homes in this unhomely desert environment wedged between an active gunnery range and the Imperial Valley’s industrial agriculture.

Leftover from the military camp, the basic elements of a town are here: roads, reservoirs, sewers, slabs, and foundations. After the camp was disbanded in 1946, the eponymous concrete slabs were left behind when the wooden buildings moved to Niland, the nearest town, four miles away. The slabs that remain today are cracked and partially covered with sand, and the camp’s original roads are pocked with holes and rutted with tank tracks. The million-gallon cisterns are empty; manholes have been filled in and their covers salvaged long ago. This residual infrastructure provides a backdrop to understand how people make homes in extreme places and how the things people make stand up to time, other people, and dust storms.

Off the grid, living in what is often called the “last free place,” Slab City’s residents measure the durability of their freedom in what they build. In structures like houses of wooden pallets.

I met Austin on one of my trips to Slab City with the Irish photographer Donovan Wylie. We wanted to understand the architecture of this place and its residents’ struggles with adaptation and resistance. When the weather alert came through, a year after my most recent visit, I didn’t know exactly how the storm would affect Austin’s pallet structure, and I wasn’t sure which version of pallet architecture would sift the wall of dust, or even if its architect was still there.

Wearing sandals made from two-by-four blocks of wood, Austin first approached us with a clipboard to ask if we’d like to see the three-level A-frame he was building. He walked us through the ground level where couches and chairs filled a shady living area on the ground. Further up, he had a workshop dedicated to hacking the proprietary charging systems of cordless tools. Magazines of AAA batteries sprayed out of the opened handles of drills and saws, waiting for their solar panel charge. Up above, a communal sleeping loft looked out through pallet frames toward the Algodones Dunes and the invisible Mexican border to the south, and westward toward Salvation Mountain and the Salton Sea’s dusty veil. Between slats to the east, we could see plumes of smoke rising from ordnance that had been dropped on the bombing range.

Slab City is here because it is a so-called Section 36. In America’s westward expansion, the National Land Ordinance of 1785 and subsequent land acts, including California’s 1853 survey, overlaid the land with a grid and divided each township into 36 sections. In this system, every township had two square-mile plots—Section 16 and Section 36—reserved for public education. Many have been sold by states to help fund schools, but this particular Section 36 has lingered as a small piece of public land, a forgotten square of desert atop East Mesa along the Imperial Valley’s ancient shoreline.

In the early 1940s, the Navy saw strategic advantages in the plot’s remoteness and its similarities to North Africa’s war theater. And so the U.S. military paid California $3,810 to install Camp Dunlap, the only revenue the state has ever received from this piece of land.

When the military moved out, migrant farmworkers harvesting creosote moved in, and Slab City’s informal settlement began. Despite pressures from developers and state officials concerned with liability, this Section 36 persists as a residual piece of Manifest Destiny where public land hosts private aspirations, rights meet hardship, and makeshift dreams ride the desert sea like concrete slabs on sand.

On Austin’s clipboard were sketches that carried more than just plans for shelter. These designs harbored visions and hopes. They delineated the fugitive aspirations of an artist, a resident of Slab City, a member of a wider community founded on an ethic of reuse. Residency on the slabs can be as fleeting and vulnerable as the materials at hand: cardboard, palm fronds, shade cloth, and pallets are themselves transient. And when I returned less than five months later to visit Austin, his original pallet structure was gone, and another had risen across the road.

If the previous project was the house of an idealist, a DIY hacker, an improviser, then this new one was the refuge of an ascetic, a hermit, a master geometer. If the first had been an exercise in communal living cast within a builder’s yard and its organized riot of materials, this second structure was a remote outpost, its peaked arch of pallets recalling the praying hands of Jerome, isolated in an austere sand and gravel lot. The frame of this inverted V rose twenty feet into the desert sky, pushing the modules of soft wood to their material limits so that the middle two pallets of each side sagged a little under their own weight, as if weary from traversing borders, supporting goods, and delivering things in the 21st century’s global supply lines.

A pallet A-frame structure, the predominant building style in Slab City. Photograph by Donovan Wylie.

Now, this frame (is it a pointed version of St. Louis’s arch and a smaller gateway to this vestige of American frontier?) rises over a box formed by 28 other pallets, making room for its resident and, at the same time, presenting another experiment in living that tests the limits of “free,” within what public land and available materials might offer.

Where do you go in a dust storm when the last free place is already your refuge of last resort? How do you avoid exposure in a place that is already fully exposed? Build what you will, with the materials you have. Each of Austin’s pallet structures embodies the independence of building up and tearing down at will. But in something like a dust storm, this self-determination reaches its limit, and freedom becomes as porous as a pallet’s slats.

Slab City’s residents have been displaced from elsewhere. (Austin came from the city he’s named for.) Some arrived here by choice, but many others came here, seeking to escape forces beyond their control—whether economic, societal, or political. And the dust storm itself is a function of environmental degradation that began with the gridding of a continent, and continued with projects to irrigate the valley, triggering the calamity that formed the Salton Sea, which now issues toxic dust from its retreating shores.

Despite its remoteness and insularity, the last free place can’t escape these legacies. (In fact, it may be at their epicenter, just as it straddles the San Andreas Fault.) In some ways, Slabbers follow in the footsteps of the soldiers who trained here because they too are training to live in the desert. And before the first slabs were poured, the Navy set up a field lab to test the casting of concrete in extreme temperatures, nearly 120 degrees in that summer of 1941. Residents of Slab City now test the idea of freedom in a laboratory of their own making.

No reports followed this particular storm, but any snowbirds who lingered on the Slabs for the summer season would have recognized blizzard conditions as yellow clouds of sand and dust blotted out the sun, lowered temperatures, and reduced visibility to a few feet. Drifts of sand likely pressed into Austin’s second pallet structure, as dust layered onto cans of food, chairs, tables, tools, and sketchpads, leaving a gray coating on every surface as if it had been there for hundreds of years. Slabbers who had cars or trailers would have retreated into their sealed interiors, while others like Austin would rely on a pallet’s imperfect windbreak to avoid sandblasting that can last for hours.

The wall of dust will be followed by other storms, just as plans to close Slab City will be proposed and then postponed, and somehow this place will endure. Freedom may not be free, but when it manifests itself in the solidity—even if makeshift—of this architecture, like Austin’s pallet structures, hidden identities become apparent. Each resident brings their own admixture of need and desire and curates an equally aggregated version of ‘last free place.’

Out here on the slabs.

The post Is Slab City, California the Last Free Place in America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Libya and Syria both descended into civil war. In Libya, the outcome has so far been an unstable political vacuum. In Syria, the death toll may exceed 500,000. Millions have been displaced, in refugee flows that have fueled challenges to liberal democracy in Europe. Now, the Syrian revolution faces outright defeat.

These facts—a success rate of only one in four and all the resulting deaths —present a troubling conundrum. Do we still believe that oppressed people have the right to resist? Or should we question whether a decision to rebel can really be justified?

One method for answering that question is to re-read philosophers on the subject, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, both from the 17th century. In the minds of pro-democracy people, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) and its arguments for freedom and the right to resist oppression loom large. Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, wrote Leviathan (1651), a great defense of absolute monarchy. You might think Hobbes would simply discourage today’s freedom struggles, but the important insights his work offers into the dangers of rebellion aren’t necessarily the ones we might expect.

Hobbes’s arguments were worked out against the backdrop of political conflict in mid-17th-century England. He believed the excitement raised among parliamentarians by the revival of ancient republican ideals of “free government” had led them to tear down the walls that protected them. Aiming for the best they brought about the worst: civil war. What they should have done instead was settle for a middle way: a government that, while not ideal, at least held off the danger of widespread violence within the state. Personal security should have been prized higher than dubious ideals of freedom.

Transposing this argument to modern Syria, we seem then to have clear advice: It would have been better for the Syrians of 2011 to let things be, no matter how oppressive Bashar al-Assad’s regime was. And as for us liberals, if we cheered on the Syrian protesters like good Lockeans in 2011, we ought to have learned our lesson by 2018 and should now be shaking our Hobbesian heads in despair at our earlier naiveté (and theirs).

I think we can learn a lesson from Hobbes, but I’m not convinced that this is it. His political thinking points to a much more nuanced analysis.

The foundation of Hobbes’s theory of sovereign authority is what he calls the “Right of Nature”: All individuals can be expected to employ whatever means best preserve them against lethal threats, and everyone, he thinks, is permitted to do so. For people living in a world without government—the “Natural Condition”—the best means might include robbery, violence, and the preventive killing of anyone who could pose a threat. But in a society enjoying the benefits of a sovereign government with enough power to impose peace between citizens, the same Right of Nature dictates a different strategy. Such a government, whether republican or monarchical, overcomes the problem of mutual distrust between unprotected individuals by enforcing laws and agreements, making it possible for people to enjoy a peaceful, comfortable life. Thus, people should obey the government.

It’s the latter strategy that seems to recommend non-resistance against a regime like Assad’s. But Hobbes entered an important caveat to his theory. If the reason for obeying government is self-preservation, then what if the government itself threatens your life? In these circumstances, he thought, self-preservation may dictate forceful self-defense. Hobbes therefore concluded that individuals retain the right to defend themselves against actions by the state that threaten their lives.

So, in fact, he suggested three strategies for preserving yourself, each suited to a different context and each morally justified by the Right of Nature. The first is preventive attack in the Natural Condition. The second is passive obedience in a sovereign state that protects you. The third is self-defense in a sovereign state that attacks you. How would these three strategies have played out across the population in Syria in 2011?

Let’s assume that before the outbreak of violence in 2011, most citizens would have been best advised to follow the second strategy—to obey a sovereign Syrian state that protects them. Even so, things changed suddenly in February 2011.

The trouble began when security forces arrested 15 teenagers in Daraa, accusing them of graffitiing their school with slogans such as “the people want to topple the regime.” Terrified by rumors that the detained children were being tortured, demonstrators demanded their children back, and protest spread to other parts of Syria. The regime resorted to force and, on March 18, security forces shot (approximately) four people dead, and wounded hundreds in Daraa. By late April, escalating violence brought the city under full-scale military siege.

Hobbes takes the unusual view that even people engaged in wrongdoing (such as unprovoked armed resistance) have a moral right to defend themselves against state violence. If even wrongdoers have this right, then those who are innocent certainly do. And he thought their rights extended to protecting their children, too. Hobbes explicitly argues that it would be both morally and psychologically too demanding for political philosophy to insist that parents acquiesce in their own children’s imprisonment, torture, and possible death.

From a Hobbesian perspective, the danger for a government using force against members of its own population is that it is therefore likely to create an ever-widening category of people who are thereby released from the duty to obey the government. This is true even if —unlike in Syria—state security forces only intend to harm those who (in Hobbes’s view) wrongfully rebel. Any large-scale use of force almost always causes unintended harm to innocent people when they are mistaken for legitimate targets or exposed to risks of collateral damage. This means that, for every person the security forces deliberately threaten, others will also feel threatened.

The moral and political legitimacy of any regime depends on maintaining a wide enough social base that feels under an obligation to follow its commands, but this base can be diminished in two ways. First, spontaneous opposition might occur even if the regime hadn’t initiated any threat against its members’ lives. Second, defensive opposition includes those who haven’t rebelled spontaneously but who find themselves threatened by the regime and needing to defend themselves from it.

The more force a regime like Assad’s uses against its opponents as a whole, the more it expands the population engaged in defensive opposition. And if it keeps intensifying its violence as the opposition grows, then it will progressively eat away at its social base by forcing more and more people to change strategy from obedience to self-defense. If the government persists in doing this, then eventually the ratio between the regime’s social base and its opponents will reach a point where the country has fallen into full-scale civil war.

For Hobbes, civil war constitutes the death of the body politic and the greatest danger to those trying to survive within it. The need to avoid it was the reason why he doubted the idea of deliberately seeking political revolution. But avoidance of civil war is also the aim which ought to motivate governments, on his analysis, in their decisions about how to rule. Hobbes’s theory of rightful self-preservation helps identify errors that a regime like Assad’s should have avoided.

The philosopher’s analysis thus suggests that many people finding themselves in the spiraling cycles of violence that began in 2011 had no credible alternative and were therefore justified in resisting a regime that actively threatened them. We really can’t condemn those people. But what we can condemn is the government because it has failed its chief objective, which was to prevent the outbreak of civil war. Assad’s mismanagement of violence itself helped create and then expand the basis for legitimate defense against the regime and, hence, for wider rebellion and civil war.

So, what would Hobbes do now? After seven years of fighting, Syrian forces have recently retaken Daraa and are close to a complete victory over rebel forces. Now, it might seem tempting to think that Assad has made good on his mistakes and that a Hobbesian analysis would point towards a renewed obligation to obey the regime in Syria. But I think this conclusion is doubtful.

Hobbes argues that political obligation begins in a covenant by which individuals commit to obedience for the sake of protection. It is highly doubtful that a leader who has laid waste to vast swaths of his country, massacred hundreds of thousands of his own people, and secured victory over domestic opponents only with the military assistance of at least two major foreign powers (Iran and Russia) could offer to surviving Syrians a credible partner in a new social contract.

Syrians may not presently have any alternative to turn to. But Assad doesn’t even have the minimal legitimacy of a Hobbesian monarch, let alone anything that would merit the approval of a Lockean. Viewed in the unforgiving light of Hobbes’s political theory, his regime remains the problem; it is unlikely to have become the solution.

The post When Is It Right (or Wrong) to Rebel? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Prior to the visit, my family and colleagues were supportive. When I confessed to a close friend that I was nervous, he said, “Time to get out of your comfort zone.” That was an understatement. My law partner gave me the pep talk about everyone being entitled to representation, but I wasn’t even a criminal defense attorney. Hardly any of us in the “GITMO Bar” were.

According to what had been scared up through a Freedom of Information Act request, Obaidullah was accused of being part of an Al Qaeda-affiliated cell that was preparing roadside bombs against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan. Official reports said he confessed while in custody in Afghanistan. Later, at Guantánamo, he’d recanted, saying he’d been tortured and the confession coerced. Was my client guilty of terrorism? Who knew! There had never been any test of guilt or innocence, just six years of reported interrogations and torture.

My first day on the base, after being thoroughly patted down and every piece of paper removed of its staples, I met Obaidullah in a small concrete bunker. He wore a simple tan smock and trousers, and his ankles were shackled to the floor. He was about five foot seven, 150 pounds. But mostly, he seemed young. Captured at age 19, he had grown into a man in this prison. He told me he was not guilty of the claims made against him. He was polite but skeptical that I or anyone else could help him. His voice, speaking his native Pashto, was soft, but with an occasional strain that would end in a note of incredulity. “Tell your government that all I want is to go back to my family,” he said through an interpreter. “Why do they keep us here, without giving us a chance to prove we are not guilty?”

Here was a face to put to the name; here was a man struggling to understand who I was, and whether he could trust me. In those early days, most of the Americans he had met had been military or intelligence personnel. His first attorney had failed to gain his confidence. So many lawyers were fired by their clients at GITMO that it was a running joke among the attorneys. Just stay hired, I told myself. That’s the first step.

Official Guantanamo photo of Obaidullah.

For me, this journey to GITMO had started with a simple request. My law firm was asked by the Center for Constitutional Rights to represent a single detainee in Guantánamo Bay in his habeas proceedings. The Center had filed the first lawsuit on behalf of the roughly 780 men detained there as enemy combatants, and was co-counsel in the 2008 Supreme Court decision securing their right to judicial review. But a large number of these men, who had been detained for up to six years, still did not have attorneys who were willing, pro bono, to contest their imprisonment. The Center was reaching out to law firms nationwide, building a “GITMO bar” to take these cases. Would our small firm be willing to handle just one?

Obaidullah (as with many Afghans, he has only one name) had been arrested at his home during a raid in the middle of the night. No charges were leveled against him until 2008 (after six years of detention). They included conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Later, in 2011, a military lawyer assigned to his defense team found evidence to support Obaidullah’s claims of innocence, including substantiating his family’s claims that the seemingly incriminating mines had actually been left there during the Soviet occupation, while he and his family were in Pakistan. Although his military lawyers sought a speedy trial, the U.S. government simply dropped the charges. The government didn’t need them. They could rely on indefinite detention instead, as they did with most of the other Guantánamo detainees. Detention without charge. Obaidullah remained in custody at Guantánamo for another five years until his release in 2016, and 31 men remain in the same situation today with no charges pending.

But that all came later.

How do you establish rapport with someone without any shared cultural reference points? Obaidullah had been living on a small farm and working in a general store in rural Afghanistan outside of Khost, a two and a half hour drive from Kabul. His entire life had been subject to the ebb and flow of the constant state of war in Afghanistan, from the Soviet invasion to the Taliban takeover. His family bore no love for the Taliban. He had an 11th grade education and had learned a little English in school.

Before being captured, he thought that Britain was more powerful than the United States, so little did he know of the world outside his village. Once captured, he had no access to any outside information about his fate; he relied on what other detainees, guards, or interrogators told him. He also had no way to find out anything about me. It wasn’t until after our habeas hearing, in which he had been allowed to listen remotely to my public opening statement (the rest was classified and not even he was allowed to hear it), and saw how hard we had worked for him, that I think he let himself believe in me.

For my part, meeting Obaidullah face-to-face removed any doubt about what I was doing. At the time of his capture he was recently married—his daughter had been born just days before U.S. forces took him from his home. To this day I know his daughter’s age. My own son had been born the same month.

Obaidullah told me he was tortured at Bagram Air Base, and that the abuse continued in interrogations at Guantánamo. Not until later, after we’d known each other for several years, did he tell me what happened. He signed a statement that we filed in court describing what the judge called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” International law calls it torture. Obaidullah described being beaten on the head with a gun and threatened with death by a guard who was sharpening a long knife. He was forced to carry sandbags all night and not allowed to sleep. He was kept in a small barbed wire cage. His hands were tied above his head for hours. He was subjected to extreme heat and cold over many months’ time.

Fazel Karim holds a picture of his brother, who was recently released from the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

Obaidullah asked me why I was trying to help him. I told him that I believed that everyone should have the right to present their evidence in court, and that I understood he had little hope my government would do the right thing, and that I was committed to doing everything I could to allow him to have a hearing. It sounded pretty theoretical and pie-in-the-sky, even to me. We talked about President Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo Bay, which had been delivered just months before my first visit. We talked about the political battles that made it hard for Obama to fulfill that promise.

Over the next seven years, I went to Guantánamo Bay a dozen times to meet with Obaidullah. For his habeas hearing we coordinated multiple attorneys and expert witnesses, and pulled together a brief that was over a hundred pages long with more than a hundred exhibits. But we still lost. After the Supreme Court in Boumediene granted detainees the right to petition for release through the writ of habeas corpus the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals never again approved of any detainee’s release, and the system ground to a halt.

My colleagues and I went often to Guantánamo to meet with Obaidullah. We were the only ones allowed to, after all. We talked movies, children, pets, family, books. He liked My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the Fast and Furious franchise. He was a fan of How I Met Your Mother. Over the years, we had shared with him tales of our honeymoons, camping trips, and trekking tours around the world, and in one of our last conversations before his release, he told me that he liked in particular our habit of taking vacations with our families. Family travel, he told me, was not something he had heard of, and he looked forward to trying it with his.

We lawyers were sometimes allowed to bring in food, and we tried to anticipate what he might like—mocha ice cream was a favorite (though it nearly melted by the time we got back from the Navy Exchange where we bought it during lunch). Nutella spread onto a biscuit with a military-issue spork was also a hit. Sometimes we talked about having a proper meal together outside the prison, after he was freed.

What amazed me the most was Obaidullah’s compassion—at this point, under these circumstances—and his ability to express empathy and appreciation, even humor. He began our visits with inquiries into the wellbeing of our families, and recalled what we’d told him about their interests in soccer and science. When one of our lawyers dropped her cell phone into the bay he found that a rich vein for relentless teasing, as he did if we were late to a meeting. During our regular phone conversations, which I took from home as they were scheduled very early West Coast time, he loved it when my dog barked: It was a small but vivid reminder of the real world.

Since 2002, nine detainees have died at Guantánamo. Of those, at least one died of an apparent suicide and another from injuries sustained while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. With the situation looking hopeless, the prisoners felt that refusing to eat was the one means they had to register their protest. In 2013, with transfers out of Guantánamo Bay at a complete standstill, the majority of the men in the camp began a hunger strike. In part as a result of those desperate hunger strikes—my client withered to about 120 pounds—Obama instituted Periodic Review Board hearings that would assess whether each detainee currently constituted a threat, regardless of what he may or may not have done in the past.

In December of 2015, Obaidullah was informed that he was scheduled for a hearing before the Periodic Review Board, and in April 2016, I went down for 10 days to prepare for and participate in the hearing as his private counsel. In May, we were notified that he had indeed been cleared for transfer, and this past August, he was finally released from Guantánamo Bay to the United Arab Emirates. He has been placed in a government rehabilitation program there. I won’t be able to hear from him for many months. It will not be easy for him to readjust to the world after suffering what he has been through, or to live as an Afghan immigrant in the UAE. His future is unclear—after a few years he should be able to return to Afghanistan. That too will be no picnic for a former detainee. But one thing is clear. The minute I am given the go-ahead, I plan to take my son and husband, go meet his family, and share that meal outside the prison walls.

The post Winning Freedom From Guantánamo With Forbearance and Trust appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Whittemore, who was born in Massachusetts just before the turn of the 18th century and was the grandson of the first Whittemore to arrive in America in the mid-1600s, was in his late 70s when he saw the Red Coats on this April 17. To his family’s horror, Whittemore snatched his musket and crouched behind a stone wall. Other minutemen begged him to move to a safer position, but Whittemore disregarded their pleas. Whittemore killed three British soldiers; in turn, he was shot, beaten, bayoneted, and left for dead. Refusing to give the Red Coats the satisfaction, he recovered and lived almost two decades longer—long enough to call George Washington his president.

Whittemore was the oldest known combatant in the American Revolutionary War. In 2005, Senate bill 1839 declared him hero of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and designated February 3 as the day to commemorate him.

Samuel Whittemore Monument located in Arlington, Massachusetts

That was the day when I found out he was also my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. My brother, Andrew, called to tell me about our ancestor’s antics, exclaiming, “They were all over the internet.” It was a big day in Boston, and a day of revelation for me. My brother and I scoured our family archives and the Internet to learn more about him. I thought I was the only Whittemore who acted out on impulse and ignored admonitions of those close to us. I thought I was the only Whittemore who recklessly battled for independence.

The original Whittemores arrived in the Boston harbor from England, no doubt strutting rigidly down the planks of a Mayflower-like vessel with proper comportment and clear-cut intentions on a pre-ordained life course. People in my family attended schools like Wellesley, Colgate, and Babson immediately after high school. There was no question they would obtain degrees, and many started their own insurance companies. They married young, and raised children who would follow direction.

The blue-blooded Whittemores handed these customs down through the generations: Do as you are told without question or deviation. Use salad forks and dessert plates. Live in tidy homes with manicured lawns. Play golf, decked out in L.L. Bean gear and slacks with ducks embroidered on them. Refrain from outbursts of immoral, rash behavior.

The author, with her parents, in 1968

I, on the other hand, dropped out of Boston’s Emerson College in 1985, at age 19. I was enamored with the early punk scene and ran pell-mell to California with a boyfriend, deaf to protests from parents, teachers, and relatives. There was no strategy. No plan. A new horizon beckoned, and I was down for anything.

For a period of time, I was able to do whatever I wanted every minute of the day. I secured full-time employment at Slash Records, and immersed myself in the throbbing, thriving Los Angeles punk scene. Dying my hair a plethora of colors, I wore ratty tutus with velvet hats and knee-high combat boots. I bought a clunker Nova from a Rastafarian, and I spray-painted it leopard.

I was enjoying what seemed like unadulterated freedom—which also happened to include copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. Ultimately, the independence I had so fanatically craved developed into a stifling dependence on heroin.

I sold drugs and myself to support my habit. I lost my apartment, my job, and my car. I became homeless, and crashed in shady motels with hookers, dealers, and gang members. I ended up in jail many times. Chained to a habit, I was far from free.

My addiction determined what I’d do, where I’d live. By Christmas of 2000, I had followed it to Chico, in Northern California. I had been strung out on heroin for 15 years at that point, despite sporadic unsuccessful attempts to get clean. My family cancelled plans for me to return home for the holidays after they found out I was using, again.

Broken and hopeless, riddled with guilt and shame, I realized I had smashed hard against the limits of liberty. I was exhausted and chewed up by heroin, and I finally recognized that things were going to get worse if I kept using. I had ridden Captain Whittemore’s notion of independence as far as it would go and it was destroying me. I realized freedom also brought the risk of making bad choices, and I had made a lot of them.

I called a rehab back in Southern California that I had been to twice already. This time, I was willing to do whatever was asked of me. “I am always loaded and can’t imagine life any other way,” I said. “But I can’t continue to live like this. I need help.”

Rather than a plane ticket home to Boston, my mother provided me with a one-way flight to rehab in Pomona. Leaving the airport in Sacramento, I was detained by police officers for appearing suspicious, high, and homeless. I was all three. During the arrest process, I did something I never did. I told the truth.

“You guys have every reason to arrest me. I am under the influence, there are drugs in my bag,” I said. “But I am on my way to check into a rehab. I have made this promise to my family. I have to keep my word. I know this is my last chance.”

Battling with drug addiction is not for the faint of heart. I often felt like a lone soldier with a useless musket trying to keep the drugs, the lifestyle, and the police at bay. During past stints in rehab, I handled the flu-like symptoms of kicking heroin: sweating, fever, chills, and body aches. But the sleeplessness was unbearable. When I was awake, my mind obsessed about the relief I knew only heroin could deliver, and I went back to the streets.

But I did not go to jail that day in 2000 or any day since. I have remained clean and sober for 14 years since that fateful Christmas Eve. I have patched up relationships with my family and friends. I returned to college and earned my degree. I am open and honest about my battles. I am the proud mother of a 12-year-old boy who keeps me on track. And now my concept of freedom is a fierce determination to let no thing control me—to feel free to build, rather than tear down.

The author and her son, Milo

Silent tears run down my face, when my father, who usually keeps his emotions tightly reined in, tells me that he respects the strength with which I clawed my way back to sanity. Centuries separate ol’ Sam and me, and the centuries also separate our concepts of independence. But we survived circumstances where many others have perished, and in this country, we had the ability to will our way home again.

The post When the Hunger for Freedom Becomes Self-Destructive appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality. It is out of an egalitarian commitment that a people grows—a people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and each of us individually, from domination. If the Declaration can stake a claim to freedom, it is only because it is so clear-eyed about the fact that the people’s strength resides in its equality. The Declaration also conveys another lesson of paramount importance. It is this: language is one of the most potent resources each of us has for achieving our own political empowerment. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence grasped the power of words. This reveals itself in the laborious processes by which they brought the Declaration, and their revolution, into being. It shows itself forcefully, of course, in the text’s own eloquence. When we think about how to achieve political equality, we have to attend to things like voting rights and the right to hold office. We have to foster economic opportunity and understand when excessive material inequality undermines broad democratic political participation. But we also have to cultivate the capacity of citizens to use language effectively enough to influence the choices we make together. The achievement of political equality requires, among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures. Equality and liberty—these are the summits of human empowerment; they are the twinned foundations of democracy. What fragile foundations they are!

Political philosophers have taught us to think that there is an inherent tension between liberty and equality, that we can pursue egalitarian commitments only at the expense of governmental intrusions that reduce liberty. What’s more, in the last half century, our public discourse has focused on burnishing the concept of liberty, not equality. Consequently, we understand the former idea better. We have ideas ready-to-hand about the danger posed to personal freedom by excessive governmental regulation and the value that lies in autonomy and self-creation. What do we know any longer about equality?

Because we have accepted the view that there is a trade-off between equality and liberty, we think we have to choose. Lately, we have come, as a people, to choose liberty. Equality has always been the more frail twin, but it has now become particularly vulnerable. If one tracks presidential rhetoric from the last two decades, one will find that invocations of liberty significantly predominate over praise songs for equality. This is true for candidates and presidents from both parties.

Matters have gone so far, in fact, that we have even failed to notice the disappearance of the ideal of equality from our interpretations of the Declaration. In the 2012 presidential election, the candidates held their final debates in front of a blue backdrop on which the words of the Declaration were reprinted in white. This inspired the presidential challenger to riff on the founders’ language. He read out this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—

Then he dwelled on the ideas of life and liberty to argue for military funding; he focused on the word “Creator” to argue for religious toleration and freedom. And he emphasized the phrase “pursuit of happiness” to advocate caring for the needy, pursuing discovery and innovation, and pruning toward a minimalist government that gets out of the way of individual choices about how to pursue dreams.

What happened to equality? On the subject of equality, no more important sentence has ever been written than the one quoted by the candidate, but he had nothing to say about that ideal. Even more surprisingly, his opponent did not point this out. Nor, for that matter, did anyone else in the frenzy of subsequent media commentary.

I have told this story without naming the candidates because the candidates, the parties, do not matter. Yes, it was the Republican, Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, who glossed the most famous sentence of the Declaration—the very “proposition” about equality around which Lincoln crafted his Gettysburg address—without once invoking the idea of equality. But his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, our first African-American president, never called him on it either.

Political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other. As a public, we have swallowed this argument whole. We think we are required to choose between freedom and equality. Our choice in recent years has tipped toward freedom. Under the general influence of libertarianism, both parties have abandoned our Declaration; they have scorned our patrimony.

Such a choice is dangerous. If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place. I for one cannot bear to see the ideal of equality pass away before it has reached its full maturity. I hope I am not alone.

The post Must We Choose Between Freedom and Equality? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

First, Breyer cited the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ old line about not having the right to cry fire in a crowded theater. Then, he asked some interesting questions: What does that proverbial theater look like in our hyperlinked world? And what is our era’s equivalent of being trampled to death in that theater? As if remembering himself, he quickly added that the answers to such questions get defined in actual cases before the Court, over time (as opposed to on Good Morning America).

At the time, Breyer’s TV provocation was roundly denounced by all right-minded free speech absolutists (a club I frequent). But I have found myself thinking about his questions in the aftermath of two major events involving the cross-border repercussions of speech: the horrible attack on satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the hacking of Sony Pictures before the release of the sophomoric comedy The Interview.

If I am being honest, these are times when I find myself rethinking my free speech absolutism. (Wait, am I really free to say that?!).

The crowded theater is a meme in First Amendment law that is often invoked out of context and has been overtaken by subsequent, more expansive free speech rulings. Another First Amendment meme is the “marketplace of ideas”: Us absolutists like to say that all speech should be permitted so that truths can prevail in that aforementioned ideas market. A third important meme—the current constitutional test for whether the state can restrict speech—is that of “imminent lawless action.” In a case involving hateful Ku Klux Klan speech in the 1960s, the Court held that the government can only forbid speech that is intended to trigger imminent lawless action, and is likely to do so.

All of this would be easier to judge if speech could be contained within tidy territorial boundaries. But the Paris tragedy and Sony hack beg not only the Breyer question of what constitutes the “crowded theater” in this age of instant global communication, but also a redefinition of the marketplace of ideas, and of “imminent lawless action.” Should the expanding boundaries of our so-called theater or marketplace make us rethink what’s acceptable speech, because more lawless action can be more imminent in a more interconnected world?

Of course, there is nothing new about taking offense across borders at the speech of others, and taking action to stifle it. Think of Catholics across Europe seeking to silence early Protestant propagandists in the German states during the Reformation, Stalin hunting down Trotsky in Mexico City to silence his chief critic, or the theocracy of Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa to silence Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. More recently, Denmark found itself in the crosshairs after a Danish newspaper published cartoons featuring the Prophet in 2006. And the online release of the anti-Muslim film Innocence of Muslims contributed to anti-Western riots in the Middle East. Google ultimately determined that it was prudent to block access to the film on YouTube in some countries.

What’s different in today’s world, as these recent cases illustrate, is the immediacy of all speech, no matter where it takes place. Indeed, several legal scholars argued that perhaps we should rethink the permissibility of releasing such offensive material as the Innocence of Muslims, bound as it was to trigger a violent reaction. It’s getting harder to draw distinctions, at least in terms of real-world repercussions, between uploading something onto YouTube in the privacy of your home and broadcasting that same content halfway around the world. It’s a very large crowded theater we operate in.

Back in my absolutist First Amendment club, this is an unsettling line of reasoning. As Americans we are understandably wary of watering down our liberties (including the liberty to offend one another) to conform to some international norm. If we are all going to coexist in one global market or theater that transcends borders, our traditional attitude has been that others will just have to develop thicker skins and relish the same liberties we enjoy. Deal with it, in other words.

That is a fine sentiment, but it’s easier to uphold as an abstract principle than in a context where lives are at stake. It also doesn’t account for the most pressing threats to free speech rights. While we devote a great deal of attention to the few life-and-death cases that require balance protecting speech with preventing its consequences, we fail to acknowledge just how often mundane commercial interests are already influencing content and speech across borders.

This reality comes up mostly when we talk about China, where media outlets like Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have been accused of pulling punches in their news coverage so as to not undermine their own corporate interests. Internet companies, for their part, are constantly wrestling with the dilemma of either playing in China under Chinese rules, or being shut out.

Hollywood studios are also intensely aware that the majority of moviegoers are now outside the United States, and that China will soon be their most important single market. Major studio productions are keen to alter plots in ways that please Chinese and other foreign audiences. In the midst of production, the 2012 thriller Red Dawn saw its menacing villains go from being Chinese to being North Korean, lest the studio poke the eye of such an important market. Who cares about the North Koreans, and what could they ever do to us anyway?

Now we know.

Speech has consequences, and we’re already seeing how more and more entertainment content is being produced with overseas consequences (or appeal) in mind. Should news and humor follow suit? And how do we feel now that, for all intents and purposes, the de facto guarantors, regulators, and potential censors of our speech are private companies like Google?

It is no longer the preserve of Justice Breyer and his robed colleagues to decide when we can offend each other, or cry fire in a theater. Indeed, like it or not, the day may soon come when it is no longer solely up to Americans to make the call of what can be said, even here in America.

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Yeah, right—and I’m Thomas Jefferson.

If you want to know what the Fourth—and this nutty country—are really all about, head to the intersection of Huntington Drive and Alhambra Road in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley. There, at the southeast corner, in front of Cheney’s Tropic Liquor and the 99 Cent Store, you’ll find a fireworks stand—one of hundreds that go up across California for a week each year.

In our bone-dry state, most fireworks—the kinds that explode and go airborne—are illegal to sell or possess. Which only makes sense. The public airwaves are full of warnings from the authorities—the same folks who like to talk about how we’re all equal before the law—against buying or setting off fireworks, lest you hurt yourself or burn your community down.

Of course, that is not the whole story. Liberty is never so simple. This week only, the state permits the sale of “safe and sane” fireworks—sparklers and things that don’t fly. Provided you are at least 16, you can buy such fireworks between noon on June 28 and noon on July 6; the sales fund local nonprofits (many raise more than $10,000 this week). But there is an important caveat: Cities and communities can choose to ban even “safe and sane” fireworks, and more than 200 of California’s nearly 500 municipalities have done so.

The result: California for eight days is a crazy quilt of fireworks sales and bans. And the intersection of Huntington and Alhambra is perhaps the best illustration of that. Three cities converge here. Two of them ban fireworks: Los Angeles (to the west of the intersection) and South Pasadena (to the north). But the third—the city of Alhambra—is a hotbed of fireworks sales.

A sign advertising fireworks sits on the border of Alhambra (to the left) and the city of Los Angeles (to the right)

Indeed, the large fireworks stand sits on the Alhambra corner of the intersection, literally steps away from cities that have banned them. There are other fireworks stands in Alhambra near the city’s borders with San Marino and San Gabriel, which also have bans.

In these times, this may sound like another example of how our country is divided. The wise men of politics and punditry are currently afraid that America is too polarized, that we are splitting into red and blue nations. How, they ask, can we be the “One Nation Under God” the Founding Fathers intended if gay couples can get married in Boston but not in Birmingham?

In California, people in power are similarly worried about the political and economic divides between regions—especially the split between the liberal, prosperous coast and the conservative, struggling inland. We are also told that we are too often living among people who are too much like ourselves; we are said to be retreating into separate realities.

But would we truly be better off if our laws and freedoms were the same everywhere?

The fact that we have such different laws in different places can create peril: You can buy a dangerous firecracker or automatic weapon in one place and wreak havoc elsewhere. But it also makes us freer. If you have a little bit of time and the ability to travel, you can do just about anything in this country, for better and for worse. (Which is why fireworks—loud, volatile, powerful, dangerous—are such a fitting way of celebrating ourselves.)

We may even be less divided because of our differences. Remember that in California, our biggest political conflicts involve areas—taxes, prisons, water, and budgeting—where we all have to live under the same rules. We get along much better when our communities can go their own ways.

This idea—that American freedom would create crazy divides of all kinds, and that we shouldn’t get that upset about them—is an old one. “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires,” wrote James Madison, who may have set off unpermitted fireworks in his day, in The Federalist Papers. “But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

While Madison died long before California entered the Union, I suspect he would have felt vindicated by a Fourth of July in our state. He also might have been overwhelmed by all the choices at that fireworks stand in Alhambra. When I visited last weekend, there were dozens of individual fireworks options—the Mini Monster, the Purple Rain, Mad Dog Fountain, En Fuego, Black Widow, Orchid, Zombie Zapper—and combo packages all the way up to The Big Bang, which, for $500, appeared to provide enough firepower to allow me to wage war against San Diego.

I don’t care much for fireworks, but this stand supports an admirable band, the Mighty Moors of Alhambra High. And so I purchased a six-pack of Piccolo Petes, which produce a shrill whistle and gold sparks. So what if the neighbors call the cops or I set myself on fire? It’s the American way.

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