If Freedom Isn’t Free, is Leisure Leisurely?

Back in the 1965 Paul Colwell wrote a song – “Freedom isn’t Free” – that worked in me.  It stuck.  The 60’s brought with them a concept of “Free Love” that began what I’d call “the great confusion”, an idea that spread virally, that we were free to act without consequence, to enjoy without regard for the other, who we assumes would enjoy too, would feel their own pleasure.  Everything was “groovy”, baby.  In 1965, troop levels in Vietnam had increased from 24,000 to 185,000.  Colwell’s song tried to call us back a young generation from the misguided sense of freedom, with little apparent impact.  By 1969 half a million American soldiers, mostly draftees, were slogging in the muddy fields of Southeast Asia, another half million American youth were slogging through the mud of a dairy farm near Bethel, New York.  It was not a war protest, one in the mud here in solidarity with one in the mud there.  It was Woodstock, a music festival where people were high on music, love, and a haze of smoke that was far friendlier than that in the rice paddies

8000 miles away.

Here are some of the words to Colwell’s song:

Freedom isn't free! Freedom isn't free!

You gotta pay a price...You've gotta sacrifice, for your liberty.

To some people freedom is a waving flag,
To do your own thing is another man's bag.
For ev'ry man freedom's the eternal quest.
Free to give humanity your very best
Freedom isn't free! Freedom isn't free!

You gotta pay a price...You've gotta sacrifice, for your liberty.

They didn’t play it at Woodstock. 

Richie Havens sang “Freedom”.  The word freedom was sung 18 times.  He sang of feelings of longing for mother, brother, and home, of feeling like a motherless child.

Tim Hardin sang “Simple Song of Freedom” that included

Now no doubt some folks enjoy doin' battle

Like presidents, prime ministers and kings

So let's build them shelves where they can fight among themselves

and leave the people be who like to sing

Come and sing a simple song of freedom

Sing it like you've never sung before

Let it fill the air

Tell the people everywhere

That we the people here, don't want a war

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang “Find the Cost of Freedom”:

Daylight again, following me to bed

I think about a hundred years ago, how my fathers bled

I think I see a valley, covered with bones in blue

All the brave soldiers that cannot get older been askin' after you

Hear the past a callin', from Ar- -megeddon's side

When everyone's talkin' and noone is listenin', how can we decide?

(Do we) find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground

Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground

I was neither in Vietnam nor Woodstock in 1969.  I had not been moved by Richie Havens’ freedom as alienation and longing.  I had a mother, and four brothers.  I agreed with the anti-war sentiments that Tim Hardin and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young had sung; anti-war sentiment was as common as cheap gasoline.  But the oxymoronic dissonance of Colwell’s song made an impression on me deeper than two million feet in the mud of Vietnam and Woodstock.  It has played in me all my life.  What is the appropriate use of my freedom? 

Yesterday we had a visit from a couple who graduated from the University of Detroit when we did, and married in 1969 or so, as we did.  They’re retired too.  As we were walking in our neighborhood, we fell into two conversations, Kathy and Flossie up ahead, Phil and me in back.  In the half-dozen time I’d seen Phil in these 40 years, I’d always seen him as a quiet, gentle guy.   I was asking him how he was finding retirement.  He shared his work as a Hospice volunteer, and a member of boards in his church and community.  He shared a marvelously elegant comment.  “When I retired,” he said, “I knew I had worked with my head all my life.  Now I wanted to work with my heart.”  After the walk, we sat around the table enjoying Kathy’s blueberry-peach pie, and we talked about balance, how we decide between “doing our own thing” and “giving humanity our best.”  We talked about freedom.  It was like that pie.  There, beneath the sweetness of the blueberries and supporting it, was the slightest tartness in the peaches, fresh from the local orchards.  Phil and I looked often, during that conversation, into our spouses’ eyes.  No question about how we use our “freedom” elicited a simple answer. 

Retirement is more than just the absence of a job, just as peace is more than just the absence of war.  Both embrace the value of freedom.  And both call us to its appropriate use, and its just price.

Tomorrow: Faith, Leisure, and the Moral Holiday?