A Black male Democrat, a white female Republican and a college professor walk into a bar.
“What’ll ya have?” the bartender asks.
“Freedom,” they all say.
As jokes go, it’s a clunker, I admit.
Tuesday, those three people – Rep. Kabir Karriem, Rep. Dana McLean and MUW professor Chanley Rainey — walked not into a bar, but into Rosenzweig Arts Center to participate in a Mississippi Humanities Council “Ideas on Tap” series, one of several panel discussions being held across the state centering on the question, “What does freedom mean to you?”
The concept of freedom has been a key concept in philosophy since the time of the Greeks. It is defined, negatively, as the denial of something you desire; positively, as being able to do what you want.
How freedom is defined beyond that relies on the circumstances of the individual. On Wednesday, the common context offered by the three panelists was defining freedom in the context of opportunity, freedoms that rely on education and equality.
What the panelists were really discussing was the relationship between socio-economics and freedom, which is a very good place to start.
McLean, in keeping with her conservative “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” ideology, said the United States is a country where you can be anything you want to be.
“Even in Mississippi, the poorest state in the whole nation, you can be anything you want to be and that can happen through education,” she said.
That is true, at least technically, but it’s a vast oversimplification that ignores the often-crippling effects of poverty. We all know someone who has risen from miserable poverty to be successful. We consider these people to be exceptional. We admire the depth of character, determination and work ethic that allowed them to escape those circumstances and are eager to hold them up as examples.
Those of us who didn’t grow up in poverty? We didn’t need to be exceptional to achieve a modicum of success. I know this from personal experience. You do, too, probably.
What has always been true about freedom is that the better your financial circumstances the more freedom (in the form of options) you have. For those trapped in poverty, the options are few and often bad. This is why we have payday lenders and rent-to-own furniture and appliance stores. Being poor is often an expensive proposition.
The tools to escape poverty may be there, but access to them can be difficult for the poorest among us.
As a society, it works to our benefit to expand those options to the poor, but there is a stigma around poor people that intervenes. Poor people are often viewed as lacking character, morally inferior, lazy and prone to dependency. Like Pilot, we wash our hands and deny any responsibility.
That’s especially true in Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, as the current welfare scandal clearly indicates.
The current investigation involves $77 million in federal funds designated for the poorest of our residents that was instead distributed among well-connected cronies, ex-athletes and profiteers posing as Christian groups. That includes $5 million provided to the University of Southern Mississippi to build a volleyball facility because — well, let’s face it — the one thing poverty-stricken people in this state need is a place to play volleyball on their frequent visits to Hattiesburg.
As disgusting as it is, the real shame is not that so much money went to grifters with the right political connections, but how little of that money went to those for whom those funds could have lifted them out of poverty.
Each year, the state spends only a fraction of the funds designated for the poor, mainly by making it so hard to qualify for these funds that only a small percentage receive money. For those that do, it amounts to about $200 per month, which may help pay for some basic necessities but will not provide the opportunities needed to escape poverty.
Tens of millions of those dollars have piled up in the state’s coffers, inaccessible to those for whom that money could be life-changing.
The legislature has the power to address this. It hasn’t. It won’t.
In his 1941 address to Congress, Franklin Roosevelt articulated what became known as “The Four Freedoms Speech” — freedom of speech, freedom to worship God in one’s own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Those last two — freedom from poverty and the unrelenting fear it produces — are limited in Mississippi, the poorest state of all.
Unless, and until, we are willing to help extend the freedom we enjoy to those whose circumstances deny it, Mississippi will remain the least free state of all.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is ssmith@cdispatch.com.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is ssmith@cdispatch.com.
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