By Biko Agozino
The movie, Born Free,
was made in 1965 about safari hunters who killed a lion and ‘his’ lioness and
adopted one of their four cubs while the other three were sent to zoos. They
raised the adopted cub to adulthood and later released her back in the wild and
tried to teach her how to survive on her own. Years later, they visited her and
her cubs and were surprised to get a royal welcome. Some idea of freedom!
That theme of natural rights continues to be replayed in
popular culture rather uncritically. For instance, Kid Rock has a song on the
theme proclaiming that you can’t put chains around his feet because he was born
free and he could reach the top of that mountain because, you guessed it, he
was born free. Really?
Jean Jacques Rousseau theorized in political philosophy that
man is born free but is everywhere in chains. That was his counter thesis to
the original sin formulation of Thomas Hobbes according to which human beings
are born as selfish bastards who require the Leviathan or benevolent dictatorship
to keep them in check or life would remain nasty, brutish and short in the
state of nature where might is right.
Rousseau and John Locke were of the view that human beings
are good by nature and that is why they rationally came to the conclusion to
give up some of their rights in return for the equal protection of all by the
sovereign. A race of devils will be incapable of reaching the rational conclusion
that the state of nature was not ideal and that the social contract was better,
they concluded.
The American founding fathers were impressed by the ideas of
natural rights, equality and liberty but as Condoleeza Rice asserted during her
testimony to the Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, when they said
that all men were created equal, they were not thinking of people like her (in
terms of both gender and race).
For African Americans and the American Indian Natives and
women generally, the constitution was content to compromise that they were less
than full human beings for the purpose of allocating federal resources for a
long time.
Paul Ryan is right in asserting that our rights come from the
state of nature but he is mistaken to suggest that government should get out of
the way for the protection of those rights because every right has been
struggled over as a human right especially against stiff opposition by those
who assume that they are more human than others – the poor, the women, the
racial minorities, the gays – who are still constrained by visible and
invisible chains but who remain human deserving human rights.
Thus, being born in chains does not mean that you are any
less human than your compatriots who were born with silver spoons in their
mouths. All are born chained to our mother’s umbilical cords: kings and queens,
paupers and elites, men and women, gays and straights alike. We enjoy different
regimes of human rights depending on the balance of forces in human history and
the accident of our geographical locations but all of us were born stark naked
and, without exception, chained to the baby mama.
Kid Rock was obviously just kidding when he sang that he was
born free because no one is ever born free as a human being (although he may
have been referring to drug addiction and all the enslaving chains associated
with drugs). But for a major political party to adopt that song as the
presidential campaign anthem calls for a sober reflection. If they claim to be
born free, who do they suggest was born un-free?
No, Kid Rock and Republicans, seriously, you were not born
free, you were born firmly attached to the umbilical cord of your mothers as
Michael Moore joked in his autobiography, Here
Comes Trouble; he said that he wailed like everyone of us when those superhero
nurses severed his first guaranteed link to life after his birth, an honor sometimes
reserved for the macho warrior father showing off in the maternity.
No human being is ever born free compared to the chicken or ‘lower
animal’ that cracks open its own personhood shell or pops out from the womb and
walks out already chirping in tribal tongues and running and feeding on its
own.
Human beings are a different piece of work. We cannot even
hold our own necks up for months, we have to depend on the mama glands too, then
we need to learn to sit up before being taught to crawl, then walk before
running, and before we go beyond blabbing about mama and dada to learn our ABC
and 123, we learn the inconvenience of not wetting our diapers! Duh?
What are diapers for if not to be wet soggy? Before long we
discover sex and symbolize maturity with matrimony (except if you want to marry
the same sex which remains illegal in many states).
So you were ‘Born Free’ compared to whom? Compared to human
beings who were born in chains or those who remain with the chains of the
prison industrial complex clanging with every step?
Yeah, that is not just fairy tale, some of us had ancestors
who were enslaved and who were enslaved just because their mama was in chains,
nothing wrong with their human nature, just like the 99% shackled with twice
the tax rate of 1%.
Of course chains are not racial in color and so Joe Biden
was right in wondering if you promise to unchain or unshackle Wall Street, are
you not suggesting that the shackles should be on the ankles of the middle
class, white or black?
The Romney-Ryan Hood platform promises to repeal the
Affordable Health Care Act that was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court. Joe
Biden suggested that they plan to unshackle the health insurance industry from
regulation so that they can continue to refuse coverage to 40 million
Americans, including those with pre-existing conditions; refuse women the
preventive care coverage that they have a right to, yank young adults from
their parental coverage, charge the elderly more for less coverage and hand
over the hundreds of billions saved in agreement with healthcare providers back
to millionaires as tax cuts; all in the name of free enterprise and because ‘corporations
are people’.
Not even the big bad (or good, as you like it) Feds are ever
without restraints given constitutional checks and balances and so why this
fantasy about unchained market forces and the ‘idea’ of rights from nature?
Freedom is not just an idea; regulation is not the same as a shackle; and civil
society trumps the state of nature when it comes to the protection of rights!
Check out life in the jungle today and compare with civil society if you are in
doubt.
For the next four years, President Obama should put in place
a job plan that will target the unacceptable unemployment rate among African
Americans in particular and the poor working class Americans in general. Let
him allocate $200 billion to be disbursed over four years at $50 billion per annum.
On average, $1 billion will be given to each state annually to fund start ups
for 1000 unemployed youth or 50,000 start ups at the cost of $1 million each.
Multiply that with the number of employees that they are capable of hiring each
year for the next four years!
Obama’s second term should also commit to ending the war on
drugs that has seen millions of lives of poor youth, white and black, ruined
over substances that are much less harmful than legal tobacco and alcohol. Let
the unemployed youth grow and sell their marihuana legally and pay tax on their
sales while we use education to get people to say no to drugs as we do with
tobacco. Patients who need marijuana for chronic illnesses and recreational
users in a democratic society deserve the freedom of choice that some people
will give to rich corporations but not to people.
President Obama’s second term will be uneventful without a
plan for African reparations in place from day one. All groups that have suffered
great historical wrongs have received some form of reparation except people of
African descent who suffered the greatest wrongs in history. This is one big
ticket item that President Obama should promise, not because he is of African
descent but, because it is the right thing to do.
Finally, the constitutional lawyer in President Obama should
commit to abolition of the death penalty in America during his second term. Not
everyone was born free but everyone deserves to have the right to life
guaranteed as inalienable.
Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana
Studies, Virginia Tech.
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