Today, Black Friday, millions of Americans are lining up at stores to get the bargains they have waited a year for. Many Canadians are probably also making the trek across the border to partake in this now great tradition. In fact, Black Friday is one of the most emblematic features of the Thanksgiving weekend. No newspaper article on this holiday would be complete without commentary on Macy’s Parade and the stampede of customers rushing into stores after camping out for days to secure their place in line.
One of, in my own opinion, the best depictions of American Thanksgiving (to distinguish it from “Thanksgiving”) is the late, great Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting “Freedom from Want”.
Rockwell painted this as one of the four pieces in his Four Freedoms series of 1943. The idea was to help the U.S. Treasury sell war bonds, but the result was one of the most expressive looks at the four “freedoms” that Rockwell felt most-defined the American experience. Two are positive freedoms, the ability to pursue “Speech” and “Worship” unencumbered. The other two are negative freedoms, negative in the sense that we are free from them and don’t have to worry about “Fear” or “Wants”.
The first two freedoms are quite obvious. They are enshrined in the Constitution and are openly cherished by many people in the world, including the vast majority of Americans and Canadians. We might not agree with what people say or the God they worship (or don’t), but we are joined by a firm resolve that you can live your life and I’ll live mine.
The latter two “freedoms” are a little strange in that they are not freedoms engrained by law. Indeed, these freedoms are not enforced but are the result of our economic and political organization. Or should be anyhow.
Today there is a growing chorus of people, both North and South of the border, who do live in fear. It once was that only the bad guys lived in fear. Justice would prevail and honest citizens could live and enjoy their lives to the fullest. The recent episodes of spying by the NSA have created an aura of fear. Now everyone is guilty until proven innocent, and anyone can be spied on regardless of whether they have done anything wrong or not.
A quick google search of “fear of United States government” returned 155 million results. (That’s actually not as many as I thought – the term “pretty cat” returned nearly half a million results!) The top result is a gallup survey that shows that “fear of big government” is at its highest point in almost 50 years. A quick search reveals that whistle blower Edward Snowden is not the only one in fear of the NSA. It turns out many people are scared of NSA spying.
Don’t worry though, the NSA ensures us that “If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear.” It then goes on to list, in the interest of transparency, the methods it is using or plans to use to spy on you – social media activity, financial information, text messages (sent and received), skype calls, GPS-location data, facial recognition from surveillance cameras, subway passes, and the list goes on.
Don’t worry though, if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to fear. I hope you are living within the full extent of the law!
The problem with this is, there are more laws defining what you cannot do than anyone could keep track of. The Justice Department tried and failed to even come up with one number, one final tally, of all the federal laws on the books in the United States! I don’t blame them – the last time anyone attempted this in the 1980s the corpus of federal laws were scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages. In the words of Ronald Gainer, the Justice Department official responsible for coming up with the total, “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times, and still not have an answer to this question.”
And so we increasingly live in fear.
“Fear from Want” is a little different. Increasingly fewer of us go for the want of anything. Black Friday is a good illustration of this. It used to be that only high-income people could afford the niceties of life that people are lining up for today. Big screen plasma TVs that used to be outside of most people’s dreams are now easily obtained. In fact, since the cost of waiting in line during the Black Friday sales is so high for wealthy people (are they taking a day off work?) the vast majority of the buyers are, in my own estimation, part of the middle and lower income brackets.
Indeed, those who lament the perceived growth in income inequality commonly miss this point. Perhaps the rich have gotten richer than the poor (although even that is debatable), but the poor have also gotten very “rich”. Compare the “poor” of 40 years ago with the “poor” of today – I know who I’d rather be. All those things that we take for granted today – like telephones, clothes washers, driers and the like – were relatively scarce for regular Joes and Janes in the 1970s. Next to no one is lining up today to get a great deal on a washing machine; they already have one!
The material goods that regular run-of-the-mill people can buy today is astounding! Very, very few live today with a fear of want.
Norman Rockwell is one of the most prolific and enlightening American artists of all time. His depiction of a Thanksgiving feast to illustrate Americans living without Fear from Want demonstrated this point almost 70 years ago. All those photos of the madness of Black Friday – for better or worse – demonstrate that this principle is still engrained in the American psyche. And for this, we should give thanks.