jenk

Another quote from A Silly Poor Gospel:

It was February 11, 1990 [...] There was Nelson Mandela, walking out of prison after 27 years of unjust captivity. The African sun warmed me from ten thousand miles away. As he pumped his fist in the air, my heart pumped pure joy, and tears washed my face.

They had offered him his ‘freedom’ five years earlier on the condition that he renounce the revolution that had gotten him there. To their shock he turned them down. For the next five years they negotiated with him the conditions of his release until there were no conditions. They needed him to give them liberty from the shame of having a captive righteous man. Their big mistake? They were under the impression that they had freedom to offer him, when the fact was that their apartheid, and their prison bars, had never taken this free human’s birthright. They had nothing to bargain with, leaving them to beg.

His revolution had been built on the truth of equality, and so, in time would be won, whether he fought or not, whether he walked the earth at liberty or sat with the truth in a jail cell. It was the oppressors who were bound, and held captive by their tiny ideologies, and so it was they who eventually pleaded with the free man to give them their liberty.
[...]
I was reminded of that moment recently when I heard someone make the following remark. The context was a situation where the speaker was looking at the possibility of an uncomfortably mixed group. The comment was: “If (they) were here, I might lose the freedom to be myself.”

Wow, what kind of tragically fragile freedom is that?

Yes, I added the bolding. You can read the full article here.