Given the rapidly unfolding course of events on campus this semester, I decided to rework the final assignment for the class I was teaching. The course description on the syllabus reads:
The updated final prompt became a slightly more structured version of the following:
I worried it might be too abstract or too earnest a set of questions, but my students met it with genuine interest, thoughtfulness, and creativity. It was lost on no one that while they were writing, riot police arrested fellow students in the library holding a teach-in on Palestine, leading to multiple concussions, hospitalizations, and now expulsions. As the Fourth of July holiday approaches, our neighbors are being snatched and kidnapped off the street while the DOJ has issued directives to prioritize denaturalization. Though my students were tasked with framing their responses in relation to the specific philosophical texts we’d read, what we owe and to whom is a question with increasingly urgent practical consequences for all of us.
As the NYPD stormed the library, those involved linked arms and chanted Assata Shakur’s refrain: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
It’s a common slogan at protests, but the language of duty and freedom feels particularly American, too. Especially this time of year, freedom and independence are used almost interchangeably. Semantically that makes perfect sense, to be free of something is to be independent of it, divorced from it. And yet, the very idea of duty entails some sort of bond and connection. A duty to fight for freedom isn’t a call for independence, rather one for collective liberation. Only by embracing the ties and entanglement of mutual love and support can the chains that weigh us down be broken. To be free is not to be set loose or go it alone; it is to exchange relations of control for those of collaboration.
***
My best friend is convinced she has a special gift for pulling tarot cards, and I’m just the right amount of woowoo to go along with it as she brings out a deck at social functions. We were both spooked recently when twice in the same night, hours apart, her draw for me was The Devil. My Protestant upbringing leads me to associate particular concern with such imagery, but the common wisdom of the arcana internet honestly wasn’t so far off my initial interpretation. Apparently, The Devil is a card about codependence — love turned to obsession, desire turned to need, connection fueled by insecurity. My more theological take turned on the idea of corruption. Satan is supposed to be a fallen angel, after all. Perhaps codependence is what happens when our very human, very beautiful desire to be seen and loved by others becomes something that keeps us chained to the worst parts of ourselves instead of a ladder to the best, when we become convinced that being treated with the dignity we deserve comes at the cost of the dignity of others.
To owe each other is not to be in debt, nor does to be owed mean there is a lack of anything. I really do believe it’s just the type of thing we are, what it is to be human, enmeshed in each other’s business all the time, characters in each other’s stories, sources of inspiration, of learning, of growth. Or, at times, of pain, oppression, and injustice. We will never be independent, but it’s our choice whether to use those bonds to lift each other up or pull each other down. The fear of not having enough, of not being enough, so often leads us to justify the sacrifice or manipulation of those perceived to stand in our way. Yet true freedom — freedom from want, from shame, from fear — will never entail a scapegoat. We can fight for ourselves, or we can fight for and alongside each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.