This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. They want rain without thunder and lightning. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. "The limits of tyrants," Frederick Douglass Let us have faith that right makes might and that faith led us to the end, date to our duty, as we understand it. Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and cannot long retain it. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all people in all lands everywhere.ĭestroy this spirit, and we have planted the seeds of despotism at our own doors. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. "The idea of democracy," Abraham LincolnĪs labor is the common burden of our race, so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden onto the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race.Īs I would not be a slave so I would not be a master. (Channing was a Unitarian minister.) As you struggle for your independence, I hope these give you strength. I found them, or versions of them, in Singing the Living Tradition, a Unitarian Universalist hymnal. Here are four visions of democracy – by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, William Ellery Channing and the medieval poet Saadi. READ MORE: Watch: James Earl Jones reads Frederick Douglass' 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' speech We may have to live inside a world of white power that's protected by our judicial overlords, but we don’t have to believe, as they do, that white power is freedom. Perhaps most of all, it is an opportunity to take back its democratic meaning. "It is sick."Ġ5 16 2022 06 05 04 Even so, the Fourth of July serves as a good reminder that freedom is not what we are given. "It is the most grotesque of marketing schemes that is killing, yes, literally killing those very Americans whose existence is now being used as leverage by news networks and a political party to breed that fear, to make more money and to win votes," he concluded. Those conspiracies pushed by a former president, House Republican leaders, social media monopolies and a powerful cable news network - billionaires, they're leveraging that fear to make more money and to gain even more power, by preying on the aggrieved, working to turn white against Black, white against Hispanic, white against Muslim, white against Jew." Russia's Putin, a tyrant who has unleashed terror on an entire continent because he is still stricken a generation later by the collapse of the Soviet Union union or, yes, like that infected appendage still attached to the GOP, the Trump wing, fueled by white grievance and wild conspiracies. "Like Hitler's Germany, haunted by a shattering defeat after World War I. "Like Faulkner's Quintin, whose very body was an empty hall echoing with names, he wrote, 'It was a barracks filled with stubborn, backwards-looking ghosts,'" Scarborough continued. RELATED: Here are the high-profile mass shootings inspired by far-right 'Great Replacement' rhetoric: CNN Fear feeds on the dispossessed minds mired in lost causes like this." Once again, fear is a tool being used by media moguls and tyrants to target the weakest and most emotionally fragile among us. "Fear allows us to hate people we don't know, and it even makes us forget the best in ourselves. "Fear locks our minds on the past, and it makes us anxious about future," Scarborough said. The shooter posted a lengthy manifesto online before driving more than two hours to Tops Friendly Markets, which he targeted because it was located in a predominately Black neighborhood, and the "Morning Joe" host said his hateful screed matched racist theories promoted by conservative broadcasters. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blamed a certain cable news network for a white supremacist who gunned down 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store.