Land of the Free

Growing up in America, as I did, one word you cannot avoid hearing over and over again is “freedom”. Along with “liberty” it is one of those buzzwords that underpin the image Americans have of themselves as a nation. It was true enough during the Cold War, when the US saw itself as a bulwark against Communist tyranny, and it’s still true today.

For Americans, “liberty” and “freedom” are so-called “virtue words”, words used in politics to reinforce particular political beliefs.

I’m not sure what comparable “virtue words” would be for Finland. Perhaps, “itsenäisyys” (“independence”) and “isänmaa” (“fatherland”), but certainly not “freedom”. You don’t hear a lot of people here going on and on about “vapaus”. And I would say it’s not because Finns feel any less free. They just don’t harp on about it.

Americans’ conspicuous focus on freedom and liberty may be peculiar to the US. It often seems Americans assume that they enjoy freedom like no other nation, because, well, simply because they are Americans, and Americans are, of course, freer than anyone else. It's like a law of nature or something. Or so they think.

In some ways this is understandable, seeing how the United States was born out of the grievances of British colonists who were convinced their liberty was threaten by a faraway Parliament. The obsession with freedom started early on. (The “liberty” of African slaves, however, was entirely another matter.)

I’ve sometimes wondered whether this early American sense of grievance was overblown. Were North American colonists really that badly oppressed?

Or did it have more to do with those colonists taking exception to the way the British government insisted on them paying for the British military defending them? Or for not allowing the colonists to squat on Indian land beyond the Appalachian Mountains? Was that the liberty that was being infringed upon? A radical notion, no?

Anyway, “freedom” – like almost anything else – can be fetishized. Some Americans, especially on the right, seem to have an over-developed sense of “freedom” as being central to their lives, something they are constantly in danger of losing, something under constant threat.

This was partly the rationale of the right-wing extremist militants who occupied, for some forty days and nights, a parcel of protected landscape in southeastern Oregon called the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

This motley group of heavily armed men (and some women) took over the refuge, which is apparently a prime environment for migratory birds and for somewhat migratory birdwatchers, after disputes arose between neighboring ranchers and the Federal officials managing the refuge.

A couple of days into the illegal occupation, the group led by Ammon Bundy, a second-generation anti-government agitator, named itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. “Constitution” is another important “virtue word” in the American lexicon.

Ammon is the son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who successfully defied the American government two years ago when Federal officials tried to take action against him over the one million dollars in fees and fines Bundy had been refusing to pay for twenty years for the privilege of grazing his cattle on government land.

When the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal agency managing most of the Nevada rangeland in question, tried to seize Cliven Bundy’s illegally mooching cattle, all hell broke loose in the American right-wing extremist subculture.

Bundy declared his dispute with the BLM to be a “range war” and told Fox News that “It’s a statement for freedom and liberty and the Constitution”. (A trifecta of super-patriotic buzzwords!)

Hundreds of anti-government militia types traveled from all across the country to join the protest against the roundup of Bundy’s cattle. And, of course, they brought their guns.

Before long, the confrontation between Bundy’s supporters and law enforcement turned ugly and developed into an actual standoff, with the extremists blocking roads and both sides pointing guns at each other. As it turns out, pointing a gun at a law enforcement officer is a punishable offence. In fact, pointing a gun – or in some cases, a knife, or a cell phone, or, who knows, even a ham sandwich – at the police, is a good way to get yourself killed. It happens all the time.

But not in the case of the Bundys. Rather than risk bloodshed, the BLM and law enforcement backed down. They suspended the roundup and released the 400 or so head of cattle they had seized up to that point. Bundy, who considers himself a “sovereign citizen” and doesn’t recognize the authority of the Federal government, no doubt saw this as a victory.

It did look like a humiliating defeat for the BLM. Like many liberals, I was disappointed that the authorities gave in so easily and let hostile right-wing extremists get the best of them.

At least, no one was killed. Well, not quite directly. A husband-and-wife team of domestic terrorists, who had been motivated to join Bundy’s standoff (but were asked to leave because they were too extreme), murdered two police officers and another person (a “good guy with a gun”, as it happens) in Las Vegas a few weeks later. Apparently sharing Bundy’s hostility toward the “tyrannical” Federal government, they were hoping to spark a “revolution” all on their own. They died of gunshot wounds on the floor in the back of a Wal-Mart after a shootout with police.

Some liberals feel that Bundy’s son Ammon was emboldened by the government capitulation in Nevada, setting the stage for Ammon to travel to Oregon this year to hold his own armed confrontation at the Malheur Refuge.

The fact that the FBI initially took such a standoff-ish approach to the Malheur occupation – electing to simply surround the refuge and wait out the militants for over a month, not even cutting electricity into the compound and, in some cases, letting people go in and out at will – seemed like a repeat of the tepid, kid-glove treatment the Bundys got in Nevada.

Actually, it seems the FBI was playing it smart. At least smarter than the militants.

On January 26, when Ammon Bundy and other leaders of the occupation set off in two trucks for a public meeting in a town two hours north of the refuge, they were stopped by the FBI on a deserted stretch of highway. The whole thing was filmed from the air by a police drone.

Ammon Bundy cooperated with FBI agents, seemingly offering no resistance and staying in his truck until arrested. However, the second truck, after sitting still for a few minutes, suddenly spun off. It was driven by LaVoy Finicum, one of the more outspoken and militant of the Malheur occupiers. The truck, followed by the drone overhead, continued down the highway at full speed before encountering a police road block. Finicum had nowhere to go. He plowed his truck into a snowbank, then got out to face the police with his hands up – at first, that is. 

As the aerial video shows, Finicum suddenly lowered his arms and appeared to reach for the gun he carried with him wherever he went.

He was shot dead instantly.

Finicum, who had written a book subtitled “Regaining Lost Freedom”, stated during the occupation that he would rather die than go to prison. He got his wish.

The occupation itself went on for another couple of weeks, with four holdouts camping on the refuge grounds until, after the Feds started closing in, they finally surrendered. They did not go quietly. No, they did not.

In a remarkable mishmash of modern technology and primal “Lord of the Flies” mayhem, the last hours of the standoff were live-streamed over the internet via the occupiers’ cell phones. The audio recording documents for prosperity some four hours of the holdouts screaming obscenities at the FBI agents surrounding them, as well as at each other, as a sympathetic lawmaker from Nevada tries to intercede with the FBI over the phone.

In the recording, you can hear how absolutely unhinged the holdouts sound. Literally insane. Freaked out by Finicum’s death, they seemed convinced they were about to be “murdered” by the FBI. Until the very last moment, the final holdout to surrender, David Fry, was reportedly teetering between giving himself up or blowing his brains out.

And while this hysterical dénouement was playing out, Cliven Bundy, as if on a rescue mission, left his home in Nevada and flew to Oregon, where he was promptly arrested – to the delight of liberal commenters all over the internet.

As tragic as even one death is, the ending of the standoff went about as well as could have been expected, especially considering the disasters at Rudy Ridge and Waco, which resulted in multiple deaths. Let’s hope that ends the issue, but I’m not entirely optimistic.

I haven’t read Finicum’s book, and probably never will, so I’m not sure exactly what “lost” freedom he’s referring to. In what ways was he NOT free? What freedom did he lack? The “freedom” to take over public buildings by force of arms? He was clearly willing to die for that one, since he could not have helped knowing that such a rash act would land him in prison. And he’d rather die.

This is what I mean about “fetishizing” freedom, obsessing beyond all reason over an idealized vision of what it means to be “free”. You see a lot of this on the fringes of right-wing politics.

And I don’t mean to say being free isn’t something to be craved. Everyone wants to enjoy freedom. Sadly, in parts of the world many are not able to. Masses of people are trapped in truly despotic countries (North Korea, is the clearest example) or in repressive situations (sex slaves the world over). Such folks are truly oppressed and have a right to consider themselves “not” free.

Cattle ranchers in a rich, democratic country who see themselves as victims because they are forced to abide by laws they don’t agree with do not have that right. But that’s just me.

I once got into an argument with a stranger over the internet (always a bad idea). The topic was health care in America and Finland, but it morphed into an argument about freedom. It boiled down to the question of whether Finland’s social welfare system makes people here less free than Americans.

It’s a question worth thinking about. Am I less free living in Finland? I don’t think so. Not in any way that matters to me, not in any way compared to when I was living in America. Not in any way I would die for.

Does paying a higher tax rate than Americans make me less free? Not the way I look at it. Does being unable to legally carry a handgun on my hip when I go grocery shopping make me less free? Maybe in an absolute sense, just as being unable to drive down my street at 100 miles an hour with impunity infringes my freedom of reckless joyriding.

The thing is, I don’t expect absolute freedom. Freedom, like most everything, is relative, and relatively speaking things are pretty free here as it is. In fact, freer than almost anywhere else.

And where’s the proof of that? I’m glad you asked.

The NGO, Freedom House, publishes a yearly survey on global trends in civil and political liberties. In its “Freedom in the World” report for 2015, Finland was given a perfect aggregate score of 100. It shares that distinction with only four other nations: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and tiny, tiny San Marino.

The US had a score of 90. That, by the criteria of Freedom House, is still considered “Free”, but is lower than most European countries, including Mother England (score 95). This might set Thomas Jefferson spinning in his grave.

Naturally, such comparative surveys have their faults and shouldn’t be taken too literally. And Freedom House, partly funded by the US government, has itself come in for criticism over its activities. 

I’d like to dig into the details of the survey’s methodology sometime to suss out exactly where American freedom falls short compared to Finland’s.

In the meantime, I’ll take its report at face value as evidence that, despite American right-wingers’ constant fretting over “liberty” and the dangers of “socialism”, countries like Finland are relatively freer. And that has nothing to do with the “right” to squat on a bird sanctuary. 

Headquarters of the Malheur Refuge. I would like to visit someday, 
now that the hooligans have departed.

Photo credit: Cacophony

The Police

My first job in Finland, when I finally got one, was as an English teacher. Specifically, I taught English as a second language in one of the several commercial schools catering mostly to Finnish businessmen. This was back in the day when my native tongue wasn't nearly so ubiquitous here as it is today, and many of my students were sent by their companies to improve the English they sometimes needed in their work.  

Because I am an American, I would sometimes be assigned to give lessons to students who were about to embark on their first business trip to the States. In addition to helping them brush up on their English, I was also expected to give them a little orientation on how things work in America, for example how to identify coins that have no numbers on them (maybe a uniquely American approach to money), or how to make long-distant calls on pay phones (this was, after all, a long time ago), or why it’s often okay for drivers to make a right turn when the light is red. 

One piece of advice I remember passing on to these America-bound Finns concerned what to do if stopped by the police. If they are ever pulled over by a cop in America, I would tell them, first of all keep your hands on the steering wheel. Don’t make any sudden moves. Don’t reach for the glove compartment. Don’t get out of the car. To do otherwise, could be extremely dangerous. You could easily get shot.  

I’m sure to my blue-eyed (in every sense of that word) Finnish students, this all sounded like an exaggeration, unnecessarily alarming. And maybe the only reason it occurred to me to give this particular piece of advice is a small incident that took place in a little college town almost a decade before.

After high school, I attended a tiny junior college nestled in a North Georgia valley, almost in the shadow of Brasstown Bald, the state’s highest peak. There wasn’t much to the town of Young Harris, other than the college of the same name, a Methodist school with a student body of only 600 or so. The highway running through the town passed under a single blinking yellow, not even red, traffic light at the one intersection with another highway. It was, quite literally, less than a one-stoplight town. 

I don’t think I ever knew the real name of the town cop, but to us cheeky outsider students, he was “Barney”. Not that, I guess, anyone would ever have called him that to his face. This was, of course, a reference to Barney Fife, the hopelessly inept and self-important deputy sheriff in the classic 1960s American TV series “The Andy Griffith Show”. Besides being comically bumbling, the TV Barney, unlike the show's wise Sheriff Andy always, seemed overly eager to one day, someday, finally, use his gun. He was portrayed as a fool. 

Apparently, my fellow students didn’t hold the local constabulary in much higher regard than Barney Fife, though to be honest, our collective worldview was probably pretty narrow. Looking back, our isolated mountain campus wasn’t often much different than high school, and we students may have been a little excitable and impulsive. Epic impromptu water balloon fights would sometimes erupt between dorms.  

One night, a drama developed after midnight when one of my fraternity brothers took off from campus, apparently in a poisonous state of mind over a break up with a girl or some other romantic trouble. Whether he was about to do himself any harm in reality, I can’t say. But his friends were concerned enough that the alarm went out among the frat brothers to go look for him. 

Several of us were dispatched around the valley to different spots we thought he might have gone. With a friend, I headed off in my VW beetle for “The Mountain”, one of the places where students went to party off campus. It was a Methodist school, after all, and strictly “alcohol-free” even in those days when 18-year-old college students could legally drink. Other popular spots for swigging beer under the stars were “The Dam” and “The Beach”, sites no doubt still fondly remembered by aging alumni.  

Maybe the best of all of these places, The Mountain was an airy ridge top on a broad, wooded mountainside crisscrossed by some gravel roads a property developer had built to potential house sites. Probably, it’s some kind of gated community today.  

After climbing the steep road in my VW, we arrived at The Mountain to find that not only was it completely deserted, but the surrounding forest was on fire. Well, maybe not “the forest” exactly. A campfire from that night’s party had gotten out of control and set ablaze the nearby forest floor, the thick layer of dry leaves on the ground that was now burning in a widening semi-circle. Maybe alcohol, young people, and an open fire don’t always mix well.

My friend and I jumped out of the car and started stomping out the flames, not even bothering to turn off my headlights, which in any case gave us enough light to see what we were doing. It took us a little while to get the blaze completely under control. When we were finally satisfied there was no danger of the fire reigniting, we got back in the car to leave. No such luck. The battery was dead, drained by burning the headlights too long.  

There was nothing else to do but start walking back to campus. We hadn’t gone far down the road in the dark when we were met by a car coming up the mountain. A police car. It wasn’t Barney the city cop, more like a county deputy sheriff, I think. I assume someone had noticed the fire and called the police. If he deputy had any suspicions that we had set the fire ourselves, he must have dismissed it. He gave my friend and I a ride back to town, the only time I’ve ever sat in the back of a police car. Unless I’ve sanitized it in my memory, the whole encounter was friendly enough.  

Not so for another encounter that took place that night. While I had gone to The Mountain to search for our friend, my roommate Pete was among those who were frantically rushing around to other locations. The car he was riding in, tearing down the empty highway in the middle of town, didn’t escape the notice of Barney. He was on the case in an instant and, after a short chase, pulled my friend's car over. As Barney stepped out of his cruiser to approach the stopped car, my roommate Pete, filled with the urgency of the search for our missing friend and not wanting to delay it for a mere speeding ticket, jumped out from the passenger side to explain to Barney why they were in such a hurry. It was a mistake. Barney immediately pulled his gun, pointing it at Pete. At least, that’s how I remember hearing about it later.

Luckily, Barney didn’t shoot. Luckily, he wasn’t as trigger happy as we might have thought. Still, he was twitchy enough to draw his weapon on a young college student springing out of a stopped car in the middle of the night. The fact that this could happen to someone I knew made a deep impression on me.  

(And to be fair to “Barney”, it had been only a year earlier that the county sheriff at the time had been shot to death during a similar traffic stop at a lonely crossroads in the middle of the night. Maybe, Barney had reason to be nervous.) 

Anyway, this little incident has been on my mind in light of last year’s rash of high-profile killings by American cops.  

I have a British friend who a few years ago expressed his concern that if he traveled to the US, he could be killed by the police. I was surprised by that. This was around the time that two British tourists had been murdered in a seedy neighborhood near Tampa, Florida, a story that apparently got a huge amount of alarmed coverage in the UK press.  

I would have thought that my friend instead would have feared American criminals, not American law enforcement. Maybe he had already been seeing on the Internet some of the stories of police abuse that have now become depressingly frequent.  

I have no idea whether hasty shootings, justified or not, of citizens by the police were as frequent back in the 80s as they seem to be now. What I do know is that my roommate didn’t get a bullet to the chest on that night. In the current environment, that almost seems amazing.  

Some might chalk that happy outcome up to “white privilege”, by which a white man -- especially in a rural mountain town -- isn’t reflectively seen by the police as a “real” threat in the same way that an African-American might be. I’m willing to believe that things might have been different if Pete had been black. 

Still, maybe those were just simpler times. Something that I think contributes to the way recent encounters with the police seem to escalate too often to tragedy is the pervasive gun culture in America. When cops can rightly assume that anyone they meet on the street might be armed, it’s perhaps no surprise they become trigger happy.  

That doesn’t mean they aren’t even more trigger happy when encountering blacks, but the underlying climate of lawlessness and fear is certainly a dismal background to begin with. Add to that the general animosity between black communities and the police, and the climate becomes even more toxic.  

Not that animosity toward the police is solely an issue for African-Americans or liberals. Some folks on the far right are also no fans of law enforcement. 

When Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was illegally grazing his cattle on public land, resisted police attempts last April to confiscate the cattle, he was lauded as a hero by some conservatives, while the police officers confronting him were vilified.  

That armed standoff, ended peacefully when the police backed down and allowed Bundy to continue committing his crime. Though, in the long run, perhaps not entirely peacefully. A couple of months later, two anti-government extremists, a married couple who had joined Bundy’s standoff with the law, murdered a pair of Las Vegas police officers, unprovoked and without warning, much like the recent ambush killing of two patrolmen in New York by a deranged man outraged over the recent highly publicized killings of unarmed blacks. 

Meanwhile, in Finland police last year discharged a total of six bullets while on duty. In the whole country. For the whole year. And three of those were warning shots. If that sounds like a more civilized society, it is. 

And I believe this is true, despite the sad fact that this week poliisi in Oulu were forced to use their weapons against a maniac with a hatchet who had just murdered two people. The man died, the first police-related killing since 2009 and the second since 2000. Though not a good way to start off the year, it's clearly a much rarer thing in this country than in America. 

That is something I hope never changes.