Lamar Howell's Weblog

I saw a caterpillar today crossing the five-lane road near my house. I breathed relief as my Kia straddled him going sixty mph. He was going 6 mm per second. If he could just make it to the butterfly stage, his life would not be in such grave danger.

I wonder if this is analogous to freedom we humans contemplate and sometimes loudly articulate. I think many people think they are free because they feel the call to soar, flit, and dart about randomly cavalier, but actually they are living quite serpendipitously in the highways of life. As a caterpillar they could meet their fate suddenlly, unknowingly —  something like splat. They are unaware that to be free we must struggle against what we cannot see, much like the caterpillar, but what is nonetheless real and powerful — the machinery of power, the droning rush of the crowd, and the disdain for philosophical debate.

I recently met some beautiful people at a Veteran’s Day memorial — honorable veterans, upright citizens, proud decendants of Revolutionary heroes, well-meaning city council members, hopeful cheery singing children, and the police officers there to guarantee their safety.

I tried to share a message with them afterwards, but was met with an unusual, surprising resistance. Not surprising in the fact that people generally try to ignore street preaching, but surprising in another aspect. There were many people who were clearly impacted by what I said in the way of honoring our dying heroes on the battlefield but they were struggling to let themselves listen to me. I then realized that most of the people simply were not free to choose to listen. There were so many pre-conditions to their hearing. They had become immune to listening with a fresh ear and a receptive mind. They were so accustomed to having something presented in a formal, planned, predictable way of their choosing that they were unable to process anything novel, unorthodox, surprising, unplanned, unscreened. I find this to be an extremely sad commentary on our lives as Western civilized people, people who cry ‘freedom’ so loudly. People who venerate freedom of speech, but no longer believe in it. Freedom to express only one’s own ideas can only lead to a shouting match, or to the demand for a new ‘freedom’ — the freedom not to have to listen to other ideas. It is strange, but some people believe they have a constitutional right not to hear unwelcome speech.

I see the protesters at occupy this and that city park, the chanting  and angry signs at political events, the shouting matches and clenched fists on TV talk shows, and I wonder if we as a society are past the point of civil discourse– a clear mark of a civilized society. Instead, we have a policy that whoever can shout the loudest, or drown out the other person, or ridicule their opponent is the one who wins the argument, when there is no true argument at all — only frozen-in-place,  intellectually non-defensible beliefs based on selective numbers, subjective experience, or bizarre examples. My query is this: if we cannot debate, are we still free? And if we are not listening, is it because we cannot listen? Our opinions become nothing more than pre-emptive strikes, and any contradiction means all-out war.

So, if we are no longer thinking people, educated in truth and history, and operating with open minds, wisdom and intuition, then we may be ripe for indoctrination; conversely, we must brace for the authoritarian response to the anarchy such a perilous posture will eventually lead us to.

We may be marching as fast as we can, blindly onward, only to be sideswiped by the wheels of an autocratic machine. Just like caterpillars.

Wait… whew, I just saw a monarch butterfly!