Culture

Freedom is as freedom does.It was not in 1776, when Benjamin Franklin still bought, sold and owned peopleAnd Madison, and Jefferson and Washington too-And somebody whose name I don’t know in MarylandOwned my mother mother mother mother mother Esther.I come…

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin drew a seminal distinction between negative liberty, freedom from interference, for instance, from the state, and positive liberty, freedom to self-master, or to live as you want. Berlin said both forms, freedom to and freedom from, are…

I came through into life through the pathways of this incredible planet. Planet Earth the third planet from the sun. The ocean world. The planet of abundance and life. I arrived through the portal of the people of grace. Singing…

I had her in my life for eighteen years and ten months before I got the call on a snowy April morning in 1982 that she had died the night before, of a massive heart attack. We lived across the…

Freedom is enjoying your work so much that you would keep doing it even if the money stopped, and being in the position to actually do it. Most people love a thing they are never allowed to spend their days…

On July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass delivered his now famous speech “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?”  In this the…