Here is Sara Robinson's latest article. It's a bit harder to take than her previous ones, because she is asking something of you. It's about sacrifice. and we need to hear it.
find it here: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010052231/true-cost-freedom-progressives-sacrifice-and-civilization
--Kim

The True Cost of Freedom -- Progressives, Sacrifice, and Civilization

By Sara Robinson

May 31, 2010 - 9:13pm ET

As I write this, it's Memorial Day down in the US. All over the country, the flags are flying and the high school bands are playing and the parades are queuing up. (So are the shoppers, hitting the sales at the mall.) And of course, it wouldn't be Memorial Day In America without old veterans and moralizing babbits pounding podiums in parks across the land, gravely intoning that "freedom isn't free."

Really? Is that so?

I think a lot of Americans, deep down, would disagree. That hoary old phrase, beloved of my civic teachers, has taken on a very narrow and specific definition over the past couple of decades. To a lot of Americans -- most especially the right-wingers who have seized on this old nostrum as a favorite indictment of liberal lassitude -- it mainly refers to one form of sacrifice: the kind made by soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to protect and defend American borders at home and American interests abroad.

Freedom has its price, we are being sternly reminded today; and these brave men and women have paid it on our behalf. So stand up straight, salute the flag, support your veterans, and feel that bracing sense freedom they bought for you in blood.

This is all fair enough, as far as it goes. But I don't think it goes nearly far enough. The way the right uses this phrase, it describes just one kind of sacrifice -- military sacrifice -- as though it's the only kind that matters.

And my objection is that this definition does a grand job of letting the rest of us off the hook. If the soldiers are dying in foreign battlegrounds for our freedom (just as Jesus died on the cross for our sins -- the parallels are too tempting) -- then for the rest of us, those freedoms are, indeed, free. We can go about our lives enjoying our rights and privileges as Americans, unmolested by the uncomfortable thought that anything will be ever be demanded of us in return. 9/11? Go shopping! It's the ultimate something-for-nothing. Even the Memorial Day sales at the mall don't offer deals like this.

I'm old enough to have had an actual civics education, taught by actual civics teachers, and I can tell you that back in the day, Mrs. Herman and Mr. Campbell wouldn't have let us off that hook nearly so easily. They, too, liked to remind us that "freedom isn't free" -- but their view of the sacrifice required was far more demanding and expansive. They made it clear to us that the payment due wasn't just about military service (though was an important part of it). It was about becoming a functioning American adult -- because the very definition of adulthood, in their view, was in our willingness to step up and make the everyday sacrifices necessary for our own long-term good, as well as the good of our careers, our families, and our country. The fate of the nation, they told us, depended on our unstinting willingness to step up to those commitments, which very explicitly included:

Paying our fair share in taxes to keep the country prosperous and strong -- and a "fair share" was expressly expected to be progressively more as you earned more. (Mrs. Herman quoted the Bible: Much is given, much is expected.)
Participating wholeheartedly in the democratic process. Voting is the bare minimum expectation -- the C-student performance level. We're also required to understand the government process, and stay in touch with our representatives so they have the benefit of our thinking. (Mr. Campbell drove the lesson home by getting his class involved in a campaign that ended up with yours truly, at age 17, being questioned by the inimitable Pete McCloskey at a Congressional hearing. A political junkie was born that day.)
Treating fellow citizens with civility and kindness. Right or wrong, they're fellow Americans, and we need to keep the lines of trust and communication open, or we can't run the country together in good faith. You may think your neighbor's an idiot -- and it's your duty as a citizen to counter his bad ideas with your better ones -- but you still have to be nice about it.
Exercising self-restraint, moderation, and common sense in public, so the park can stay open 24 hours and the picnic benches don't need to be chained down. It only takes one yahoo to ruin it for everybody -- don't be that yahoo. The stark choice is that we can police ourselves; or we can force the authorities to get involved in ways that cut down on everybody's freedom.
Working for greater justice and equality of opportunity for people and groups who were, for whatever reason, denied access to the full benefits of American culture and society. Their freedom has to be paid for, too, even if it comes at a higher cost. Because, whether we choose to pay it or not, the debt is carried by all of us.
Representing our country positively in our encounters with people from other nations. Don't be an ugly American. Don't let your government be one, either.
Handing this country over to the next generation in better shape than we found it, just as our parents and grandparents sacrificed and invested in it for our benefit. History will judge us on how we meet the challenges of our time, and what we leave behind that endures.

In other words: I was taught that "freedom isn't free" is shorthand for the whole social contract that enables our democracy to function, and our civilization to deepen and grow. And the obligation to make those sacrifices falls on every single one of us. They're not optional; they're the basic tribute owed to the past and the future by every adult American. And those old civics teachers made it clear that we wouldn't be political grown-ups in their eyes until we did.

As the years have rolled on, it's become obvious to me that I was taught by fossils -- perhaps even the last of their kind. While I was getting my head stuffed with this civic responsibility stuff, apparently the rest of you were getting very different messages about what it means to be American. And the idea of "civics" or "responsibility" seems to have been nowhere in the mix. I have to wonder: what happened?

Mark Lilla, writing in last week's New York Review of Books, has an idea about that. He blames the libertarians -- specifically, a two-pronged libertarianism that, working over the past 50 years from both the left and the right, willfully dissolved any notion Americans had that there was such a thing as a common good worth sacrificing for:

The blame does not fall on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or the Republican Party alone. We are experiencing just one more aftershock from the libertarian eruption that we all, whatever our partisan leanings, have willed into being. For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thingthough it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations. Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so they could get rich fast, and they haveand it's left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children. We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.

Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer stillfree from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don't talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn't). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they're right. They don't want the rule of the people, though that's what they say. They want to be people without rulesand, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage "Beware what you wish for."

And where "sacrifice" is a dirty word. Lilla's clearly going after the Tea Party in that last paragraph; but his indictment fits a lot of the rest of us as well. It's just so much more comfortable now to give ourselves a pass, and console ourselves that the Designated Others in uniform are making all the necessary sacrifices for us. It is, after all, the libertarian way to externalize the costs and privatize the profits wherever possible. We've done it with our economy. We've done it with our environment. And now we've done it with the very notion of "citizenship" and "sacrifice" now as well.

Sacrifice is a very touchy subject among progressives. I've tried bringing it up in various venues for the past ten years, and the reactions have ranged from complete non-recognition of the concept (what is this thing you speak of?) to a very public slap-down by no less a personage than Matthew Fox. The Tea Party has made it spectacularly clear that they don't intend to invest another cent in this country if they can help it, because it's not "their" country any more. (The only sacrifice they're interested in at this point involves making burnt offerings of liberal corpses on the altar of Ayn Rand.) But progressives have withdrawn their support, too, in more quiet but no less devastating ways. Face it: most of us don't have much faith left in America, either; and it's made us reluctant to invest much of ourselves in creating a different future.

With everybody on both sides refusing to make any further sacrifices for this country, bad things are happening in the breach -- things that are rapidly making the future of American democracy untenable.

For one thing, as Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, turning the military into our Designated Sacrificers (tm) is creating a moral monster. No doubt you've been in conversations with veterans that finally came down to: "I served, and you didn't, and therefore you're not entitled to have an opinion." Those who've paid the price are, in some instances, already seeing themselves as somehow more equal and entitled than the rest of us. That's a very dangerous attitude for our democracy as a whole; but under the current circumstances, where nobody else thinks they owe this country anything, it's also easy to see how they might come to feel that way.

And that entitlement is showing up in policy decisions, too. These days, the only people who still seem to have an unquestioned right to what were once the standard perks of the American middle class -- college education, full health care benefits, guaranteed pensions, decent housing, access to credit, and paid vacations -- are those who've made the military sacrifice. (The rest of us don't have a hope in hell.) Bacevich notes that this sets a bad precedent that could in time lead to an entirely separate military class within our culture -- a politically powerful one with far more rights and entitlements than the rest of us get. We're getting there fast, and history tells us that that can only come to no good.

On a second front, there's the complete disconnect between environmentalists and everybody else when the subject turns to getting off fossil fuels. Climate change activists are learning the hard way that any policy suggestion that involves the least bit of sacrifice -- even when the fate of the planet is at stake -- is going to meet that same wall of incomprehension I've run into.

Freedom isn't free. Turns out that a habitable planet isn't, either. But Americans don't do sacrifice -- even if what you're offering them in return is cheaper, cleaner, better, and ensures their kids will, y'no, survive. It's not even in their vocabulary. They don't know what you're talking about. "Sacrifice." Is that a Russian word?

But the thing I find most disturbing about our unwillingness to sacrifice for the common good is that, in the long run (and we've gone long enough now to see this clearly), you simply cannot run a civilization that without making the ongoing sacrifices necessary to sustain it. Civilizations are the end product of many generations, each one laying down its own distinctive layer of art, fashion, music, architecture, infrastructure, politics, colorful characters, and new ideas as each new wave re-interprets the legacy for its own times. In every generation, we create, build, invest, struggle, raise our kids, tend our elders, endure wars and famine and epidemics, and give up something of ourselves so that the next generation will have it better. And there is not only honor and dignity in that; there is also meaning and joy. And for most of us, it's the best hope we have of immortality.

We Americans have inherited something wonderful and terrible in its turns, but unique in the world and muchly celebrated for the stunning amount of goodness and beauty it's often managed to generate. It took hundreds of generations of ancestors -- yes, including the ones that were here before the first immigrants arrived, as well as the ones who came -- to create this thing.

It's time to get back to the work they started. Progressives need to reclaim the language of the common wealth and the common good -- and that includes the concept of shared sacrifice in the service of our shared future. Let's hustle up there and reclaim the moral high ground that both the right and the left abandoned in our great failed romance with libertarianism -- because the side that plants its flag there first is going to dominate the moral politics of the next era. We cannot allow the right to seize it.

But the way we begin talking about sacrifice is not hitting by people with the full force of the sacrifices they need to be making (something we've done rather artlessly in the past). Rather, let's start by pointing out all the ways in which the libertarian spirit has betrayed us by lulling us into the idea that the ultimate form of freedom was freedom from all accountability (in the form of oversight), restraint (in the form of regulation and transparency), and the need to sacrifice (in the form of taxation and the need to be mindful of the common good). We've now got half a dozen major catastrophes on our hands as a direct result of that idea. Predictably, a few people got the free lunch; and the rest of us are stuck with a far bigger bill than we could have ever reckoned.

Anybody who still clings to the false idea that sacrificing for the greater good is a sin against our national prosperity (I'm looking at Glenn Beck, among others) deserves a good public mocking, too. They're moral adolescents -- I'll do what I want, and it'll all work out -- who are actively making the adult work of civilization-building impossible. And when these same folks turn around and tell us unctuously that "freedom isn't free," let's ask them what price they've paid today, personally, to make this country a better place for the long term.

Paying that debt, forward and backward, is not a job you can outsource. It's not an externality you can dump on the public and the military. Rather, it's the non-negotiable obligation you take on when you choose to call yourself an American. Most of us became progressives because we took our obligation to the greater good seriously. And we don't need to endure even one more lecture on the price of freedom from a right wing that has willfully and consistently refused to pay its bills.

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Access News Service

Wednesday, June 02, 2010