Live Free or Die
The New Hampshire state motto, “live free or die,” has long since irritated me. I’ve mulled over it ever since I was a young kid; with a mother living in Maine and a father living in Vermont, there was no escaping frequent trips across the granite state. And, as those words are splashed across every New Hampshire license plate, it’s a hard concept to ignore – even for a kid who might otherwise be daydreaming.
After the tiniest scrap of research, I discovered just this morning that General John Stark coined the expression in 1809 (I have no idea who General Stark is or why he is important, but this isn’t a research paper so please excuse the lack of due diligence). Then, in 1945 when WWII was nearing its battered end, those simple four words were selected as the official state motto. I must assume, then, that the motto is meant as a cry of defiance in the face of fascism; that it is a bold and strident challenge to any government that attempts to make claims on independence and personal freedom. It’s a state motto that tips its hat to the founding ideas of the American constitution and to the lofty flight of our emblematic bald eagle. On the surface, those sponsoring thoughts seem fair and reasonable. Who on earth wants their freedom stripped from them? The American settlers certainly didn’t, and neither did the Jews nor the slaves nor today’s African American, who even one hundred fifty-five years after their emancipation, are still marginalized and mistreated, forced to assert that their Black Lives Matter. How incredibly demeaning, how deeply sad and unjust.
But what does it actually mean to live free or die in today’s world? Not in 1776, 1865 or in 1945, but today – in 2020. Trump has made a mockery of the concept of freedom. As president, he is free to pull our nation out of the Paris Agreement; free to build a wall meant to keep others out; free to shamelessly boast about groping women; free to jeer at the disabled, the fat and the overlooked; free to assert bold lies and untruths; free to monger and pillage; free, above all else, to pursue profit margins.
Is this freedom?
Is it an expression of freedom to refuse to wear a face mask? Are you free when you deliver racist rants to the Mexican shopper sharing the same aisle with you at Walmart? Are you free when you buy stock from a company that strips the earth of its natural resources, or free when you purchase an automatic assault rifle? Is assault the same as freedom?
What about the idea of social and civic responsibility? What about the concept of treating others as peers, and as deserving equals? Is there no freedom in protecting your neighbor? Aren’t we safeguarding the freedom of ourselves and our future generations in preserving our natural resources? What about the freedom of those children who died at Sandy Hook, or the countless others who died at the hand of needless gun violence? How will we be free when the oceans overtake our shores and drown our cities, when certain sectors horde our rights to affordable healthcare, when technology steals our children’s creativity?
Perhaps my thinking is too grey and nuanced, but at this point in my life I call bullshit on the New Hampshire state motto. It’s much too simplistic an assertion that we should all live free or die. Based on how some of today’s Americans understand the notion of freedom, if we’re all free to live or die then the inmates will be running the asylum. Freedom does not and should never override our obligation to be stewards to both our land and our people. Freedom does not equate to an inalienable right to be belligerent bullies and menacing tyrants. What a ridiculous and ill-conceived notion. How uncivilized, how inhumane, are we actually willing to become?
So what would be the better New Hampshire state motto? How can we imbue our people instead with a sense for moral and ethical freedom? How do we finally understand and promote the idea that personal liberties also come with moral obligations and that the two cannot be separated but must, instead, be forever conjoined?
Live Free and Responsibly, perhaps? Live Free & Let Live? Love Others or Bust? I don’t have the answer to a quick sound bite that wraps up in a mere four words or less a concept that’s deserving of infinitely more thought. Perhaps that is the limitation of slogans. Sometimes when an idea is stripped to a perceived essence, it is also stripped of its actual significance. So, I say let us not be harmfully and moronically free. In my estimation, inalienable rights are infinitely more sophisticated than mindless bluster.