Living Unfreely But Comfortably? - Part One

by Lucy S.

I was particularly struck by something Edward Snowden said as I was listening to the interview in which he discusses his decision to come forward publicly about the U.S. government’s secret massive data collections of our emails, phone calls, and internet records. He said this:

You have to make a determination about what's important to you. And if living unfreely, but comfortably, is something you're willing to accept – and I think many of us are – it's the human nature – you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck - for relatively little work, against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that that's the world that you helped create, and it's gonna get worse with the next generation, and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/youre_being_watched_edward_snowden_emerges

I have been thinking about this a lot because he articulates the choices I have been trying to understand for years, ever since I began to realize that something far worse than I’d understood was going on in our political and economic system. And these realizations have only deepened over time, both from further study and from lived experiences.

At 29, Snowden had more than many of us will ever have – a high-paying (possibly interesting) job; a home; a partner with whom he apparently had a good relationship; a comfortable present and future, living in Hawaii. And so in one sense, that was the very specific comfort he was surrendering in exchange for the freedom to tell the truth about what he knew the government was doing, and to participate (in a larger way than most of us will ever find available to us) in determining the course of his society.

In his case, the choice became clear, so that it could be articulated in just that way: living unfreely but comfortably or bringing the attention of the world (the public) to the “architecture of oppression” which, in his position for a government subcontractor he was helping to create. Of course, that world was already being created before he was born, but the use of this technology to spy on and control everyone around the world is a particularly ominous leap toward greater oppression.

For most of us, our own choices feel far more mystified and muddled.  What great revelation could we come forward with?  We’re always battling this sense of systemic inevitability and personal weakness. And where is our big choice, anyway, even if we were willing to make it?

For those of us who read enough alternative news, Snowden’s information doesn’t feel that shocking. What hits me the hardest about this story is that finally – maybe – most people in the country will know about this, and the government will have to respond in some way. But what will that response be? So far, some of our Republican as well as Democrat political leaders want Snowden prosecuted.  At the same time, many of them claim to not know much about what goes on when these huge revelations come out.  Now, at least, they can’t say they don’t know. And many of us now know… something about it, at least. The more we know, the harder it becomes to live comfortably with business as usual (which is why many of our political leaders want to terrorize other would-be whistle-blowers by ruining the lives of those who make us confront grim truths). 

But it seems to me that the choice often feels like living unfreely and sort of comfortably OR living unfreely AND uncomfortably.  It is hard to figure out how we are to enact freedom of the kind Snowden is talking about – the freedom to actively participate in our society, to overtly oppose what we believe is wrong, and to do so without our government spying on us.  This is, or would be, the freedom to act as a full-fledged member of one’s society, to participate in public life.  But I notice a backlash in myself at times, a feeling that I am sick of knowing and thinking about all of these huge, horrible realities if I can’t change them.  It isn’t that I am trying to choose comfort, exactly.  What I grieve at times is the loss of what feels like my own nature, and thus, in some sense, my own freedom.

I am slowly reading My Ántonia by Willa Cather, and into the midst of this discussion, I want to interject a passage.  The protagonist is Jim, who at the time of this passage is about 13. Antonia, about 17, has moved from the farm into town to live with and work for a family next door to Jim and his grandparents.

There was a basic harmony between Ántonia and her mistress. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. The loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. (End of chapter 6, book 2).

I do not mean to say that my nature is or was the same as theirs – and the me who is the student of literature and theory is flailing about inside of my mind, interrogating notions of individual nature as well as Snowden’s ‘human nature’ – but when I first read this passage, I felt a merged bodily and emotional memory stretch out toward whatever it stirs up in me. Maybe this is the wrong question, but how would Ántonia and her mistress respond to something like Edward Snowden’s revelations about their government?  It may be that the kind of people they were is so far removed from the realities of now that such a question is pointless. But the thing is that I don’t think WE are so far removed from their ‘natures.’  Don’t we still revel in these kinds of pleasures – these fused sensory and spiritual pleasures? These deeply satisfying comforts? Or at the least, don’t we ache for those times in our own lives when we did revel in them?

I am starting to believe that we cannot choose between living unfreely but comfortably and the implied opposite – living freely but uncomfortably.  I had come to think of comfort with a certain disdain, an idea of it as mental and physical laziness and spoiled hedonism.  But maybe this is wrong.  Don’t most of us yearn for comfort?  What is the alternative? Discomfort? Do we prolong situations in which we feel terribly uncomfortable?  Or, even when we put ourselves into uncomfortable situations, aren’t we aiming to ultimately expand the amount of this world in which we can feel at home? When I used to run (too long ago), I soon began to feel comfortable running. I got tired finally, yes, but I didn’t run feeling that I hated every second of it and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I did it enough until I loved the feeling. And when I began to get the most out of my more difficult theoretical studies was when I’d become comfortable enough to grasp the readings without having to think about each sentence for so long that the task was grueling. No one wants to just freeze a state of agony or even more muted misery. And why would we want to cultivate that kind of masochism?

And yet we live in a world in which we have got to figure out how we are going to respond to some horrific realities. They aren’t going to be wished away by us simply ignoring them and enjoying playing with kids and animals and losing ourselves in the music we love or digging in the dirt. So then, how do we merge our love for these well-lived-in joys with our need to drag the atrocities and betrayals out into the light to stand up to them?

I’m thinking that what Edward Snowden really chose was to reach out toward both freedom and comfort. I’m thinking that maybe he had become utterly uncomfortable with what he had to face at work – the continued realizations regarding our governments mass expansions of the “architecture of oppression.” 

And this can happen on multiple levels. If I discover that the food I’m eating is filled with additives that are making me or my kids or other loved ones sick, I am going to be uncomfortable eating it and will find comfort in another way of eating. If I realize (as Snowden himself found out) that the wars that are supposed to help combat oppression both in this country and in the places in which they are inflicted are actually used to expand and deepen oppression – that they devastate the people of those countries and the common soldiers sent to fight these wars – I will never find comfort in anything that extends or glorifies them.  And so on.

But we need to know how we ARE to live, then. What causes are worth standing up for? And how do we go about our day to day lives relishing the pleasures of body, mind, and emotion?  I was reading about these towns in Britain (and expanding into other places) which are called Transition Towns. And I see similar efforts of various names. People work in their neighborhoods to grow food, get to know one another, help each other take on problems in new ways. Food gardens are started in front yards and other open places. We stop waiting for the ‘right time’ and the ‘right place.’  We don’t wait to travel somewhere else where the people with the same exact political agendas congregate. This doesn’t mean we go into these efforts naively. This isn’t “all you need is love.” It’s joyous action.

Here is one experience we had in our neighborhood. Almost ten years ago, when we were doing work on this 1957 house we'd bought, our neighbor – the one with the Southern flag in his garage, the one who seemed so reactionary (and was in certain ways) – started coming over to help or lending his tools. When it was time to do the roof, he had a friend loan him a bunch of equipment to make it easier for us. Later, he was inspired to grow a garden when we were doing the same. His parents had grown food when he was a kid. He knew my convictions about never using weed-killer, but he continued using it. Then his own pumpkin and strawberry plants were killed by it.  I laughed at him and lightly mocked him with a “What did I tell you??!!” spiel.  (He and I had that kind of relationship.) We both taught each other things. He ended up being a great neighbor, and we were all changed by knowing each other. (He moved up north, and we still miss him.)

Here is one more experience I had when I visited my friend, Erika, two years ago. We went for walks every day in her Missouri neighborhood. One morning, we passed a couple of teenagers walking a pit bull puppy. I will confess that I'm very afraid of pit bulls. This puppy was too young to worry me, but I immediately thought to myself: "Great - so now when I visit Erika in the future, there will be this pit bull in the neighborhood."  Erika walked up to these teens, and she said so warmly (and she is one of the warmest people I know), "Oh, he's adorable. Is it a he or a she?"  The boy walking him seemed surprised in a good way. He smiled and began talking more about the dog.  The other boy also smiled. After we walked away, I told her that I had felt kind of irritated and anxious when I saw them coming toward us with that dog. She said she's scared of pit bulls, too, but she figures she'd better try to make friends with this dog now if it's going to be in the neighborhood. And she said she knows those boys are probably uncomfortable with most adults in the neighborhood because most of them dislike those boys and make it obvious. She said she wanted to try to change that. 

I like the idea of calling ourselves Transition neighborhoods and towns (and maybe workplaces and school campuses and anywhere that we can start enacting transition and transformation to a far better way of life) because this carries with it the sense of being on the move. Maybe we can create a deeper kind of comfort, one that doesn’t require so much underlying or overt discomfort. Can we live freely and comfortably?