Freedom Is Not Self-Sustaining

Janet Nash, MSW, LISW-S, Certified Yoga Therapist

Today marks the 250th anniversary of American democracy, a milestone both extraordinary and sobering.

For two and a half centuries, this country has lived inside a promise it has never fully completed. Freedom has been our founding language, our national aspiration, and our deepest contradiction. From the beginning, America spoke of liberty while denying liberty to many. Enslaved people, Indigenous communities, women, immigrants, workers, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and many others have had to struggle, organize, protest, suffer, and persist in order to be included in the promise that was supposedly self-evident.

And yet, the promise mattered.

It mattered because people kept reaching toward it. It mattered because generation after generation insisted that freedom must mean more than words on parchment. It must mean the right to speak, vote, worship, dissent, love, assemble, read, learn, question, and live without being forced into obedience by fear.

Freedom has never been passive. It has always required courage.

We often speak of democracy as if it is a permanent structure, something solid and guaranteed, like a courthouse or a bridge. But democracy is more like a living relationship. It depends on trust, truth, accountability, repair, and participation. It must be practiced. It must be protected. It must be renewed.

And right now, it feels fragile.

Many of us can feel that fragility in our bodies. The constant tension. The dread when we read the news. The sense that cruelty has become louder, that truth has become negotiable, that contempt is being mistaken for strength. We may feel overwhelmed by the march toward authoritarianism and fascism, by efforts to suppress votes, intimidate communities, control information, and make entire groups of people afraid to exist freely.

This is not just political anxiety. It is moral anxiety. It is the nervous system responding to a real threat to collective life.

Authoritarianism does not usually arrive all at once. It often advances gradually, through exhaustion, distraction, cynicism, and fear. It encourages people to give up on truth, to stop trusting one another, to believe that nothing matters, that all leaders are the same, that participation is pointless, that cruelty is normal, and that safety can only be found through domination.

Democracy asks something very different of us.

It asks us to stay awake. It asks us to tell the truth. It asks us to remain human in the face of dehumanization. It asks us to protect the vulnerable, not scapegoat them. It asks us to listen, but not surrender our conscience. It asks us to vote, speak, organize, and refuse the comfort of indifference.

As a therapist, I often think about the relationship between fear and freedom. Fear narrows us. It makes us reactive. It can make us cling to certainty, look for enemies, or hand our power over to someone who promises to make the discomfort stop.

Freedom requires something harder. It requires the capacity to tolerate uncertainty without abandoning our values. It asks us to stay grounded enough to choose wisely, even when we are afraid.

That is true in our personal lives, and it is true in our civic life.

A healthy democracy depends on people who can think, reflect, disagree, repair, and care about the common good. It depends on people who know the difference between strength and domination, between patriotism and obedience, between freedom and the freedom to harm others without consequence.

On this anniversary, I find myself thinking not only about what America has been, but about what it is asking of us now.

Freedom is not self-sustaining. Democracy is not self-correcting. Institutions matter, but they are made of people. Laws matter, but they are interpreted and enforced by people. Elections matter, profoundly, but they depend on people believing that their participation still counts.

The midterm elections ahead are not simply another turn of the political wheel. They are part of the ongoing question of whether we will continue moving, however imperfectly, toward a more inclusive democracy, or whether we will allow fear, resentment, and authoritarianism to shrink the moral imagination of this country.

This does not mean we have to live in panic. Panic rarely helps. But neither does numbness.

The work is to stay clear, connected, and engaged. To take breaks when we need them. To care for our nervous systems without using self-care as an excuse to disappear from public life. To remember that hope is not a mood. Hope is a practice.

Today, I am grateful for every person across these 250 years who widened the meaning of freedom. Those who marched, wrote, taught, organized, resisted, protected, voted, testified, created, and refused to be erased. Those who loved this country enough to challenge it. Those who knew that democracy is not preserved by nostalgia, but by responsibility.

May we be worthy of that inheritance.

May we protect the fragile, unfinished promise of freedom.

And may we remember that democracy lives not only in monuments and speeches, but in the choices we make together, again and again.