I know a village in the south of Ukraine where all the houses have been destroyed by shells or bombs. Even the ruins are full of bullet holes. , suffered occupation by the Russians for most of 2022, .
A year ago I was there and met Mariia. He lived in a corrugated iron cabin behind the rubble that had become his house, his belongings neatly organized, water bottles lined up, and generator cables well hidden. She was proud of the Ukrainian Government and cried with pity for its president, . Mariia is 86 years old.
When we spoke, in Ukrainian, he used the word “unemployment” instead of “liberation,” which was what I expected. I had the draft of a book about freedom in my backpack. I took it out and wrote it down.
We like to think that, when the right army arrives, people are free: it is a liberation. But eliminating evil is not enough. Mariia would be less free without her temporary housing, which has been provided to her by an international organization. and when the buses run again.
Ukrainians do not expect us to bring them freedom. A soldier asked me to remind Americans that they don’t need us to send them soldiers. No one can bring freedom to anyone. But freedom can arise from cooperation.
Ukrainians have to continue fighting because they know what the Russian occupation means. They have every reason to think about freedom. But in the hundreds of conversations I have had there about freedom, including talks over the last month with soldiers on the front lines, I have never heard anyone say it. Freedom has to do with moral commitments and the existence of multiple possibilities. .
When people have guaranteed health, they are less worried about the future, and are better able to change jobs
Recently, in the ruins of the suburbs of Kharkiv, and a year ago, in those of the Kherson region, I remembered a nurse who arrived at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, after the “liberation”. He wrote in his diary that that was not the appropriate word: he thought that the prisoners could not be considered free until they had recovered their health and had resolved their traumas.
Of course the timing of the Russians’ expulsion from Ukraine is important. And of course it was important when the SS fled the camps. No one is free locked behind a barbed wire fence or under bombardment.
But freedom is not just the absence of evil. Freedom is the presence of good. It is the supreme value, the condition in which we choose and combine good things and bring them to the world and thus leave our unique and personal mark. It is a positive idea.
As long as Americans imagine freedom as something negative, as a mere matter of getting rid of power, we will not be a land of freedom. We will have to listen to each other about how power can create the conditions for freedom. As conservatives say, virtue is a real thing. As progressives say, there are many virtues, which we must study and combine. AND, .
Freedom helps us know how to govern. The first, sovereignty, means the ability of children to understand themselves and the world. We say that States are sovereign, but a policy that has freedom as its starting point requires a government that helps people to be sovereign as well. The second, unpredictability, makes us undisciplined and restless. The third, mobility, is the multiplicity of paths that open before us in space and time. The fourth, reality, is what allows us to grasp the world and change it. And the fifth, solidarity, is the awareness that freedom must be for everyone.
Freedom is a national task. It takes everyone’s cooperation to create free people
And what about the home of the brave? Believing that freedom is only negative, only an absence, is cowardice. When we define freedom this way, we leave a lot of difficult questions unanswered: Who are we? What do we care? Why are we willing to take risks? What we are really saying is that that gap is going to be filled by someone or something that will solve things for us. A leader will tell us what we have to think. A market or a machine will think for us. Or maybe it’s the nation’s founders who thought for us long ago.
In order to be free, we need the government to solve certain problems. One or finish. But that’s just the beginning. When people have guaranteed health, they are less worried about the future and have more freedom to change jobs. When children can go to school, adults have more freedom to organize their lives. Children who study can defend themselves against the lies of would-be tyrants.
Freedom is a national task. It takes everyone’s cooperation to create free people. That cooperation is called Government. And freedom is a generational task. For children to grow up free, there must first be the necessary institutions and policies. Children cannot create the conditions of their own education. No young person can build the roads and universities necessary to fulfill the American dream. You always have to look forward. That perspective, that feeling that a better future is possible thanks to the decisions of the present, is what makes a country free.
When we believe that freedom is negative, we think that we are always right. We separate ourselves from the outside world and think that this is liberation. We end up sheltered in a corner, with other citizens who think the same as us. Some outside force is supposed to make us free, and when that doesn’t happen, we call our situation freedom anyway. We have an answer for everything: . And we live within our own history.
A free person knows that there is no one answer for everything or one story for everyone. When I was , I tried to listen to people who lived in different situations than mine. One of them was Mariia, who made me think about unemployment, about how to go from the negative to the positive. He smiled when he spoke to me and offered me as a gift the only beautiful object he had rescued from his ruined house. I looked at his walker and thought about what other things he needed to be free.
To be free we have to see other people and, above all, be able to see ourselves. If we understand freedom properly, if we learn the right lessons from extreme situations, we can associate freedom with government. Then that better future will await us: a beautiful range of possibilities for unpredictable and undisciplined people.
