Notes, Quotes, and Poems on Independence

What is freedom? How do our thinkers and leaders continue a dialogue that's been evolving over two millennia?

I’m sitting down to write this newsletter on the morning of July 4th, 2025. For my fellow Americans (of the US variety), that means it is Independence Day– the day we set aside each year to commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, formally declaring that the once-British colonies had become the United States of America.

You know… the day we grill meats and light decorative explosives to celebrate freedom from colonial occupation (while, over 200 years later, we *checks notes* still engage in direct colonial occupation of US Territories and fund and arm the occupation of Palestine).

Perhaps I’m just jaded or burnt out, but I don’t feel particularly celebratory this year. I haven’t even posted a meme of Jennifer Coolidge saying, “it makes me want a hot dog real bad,” like every other unique homosexual. Rather than keep my neighbors awake and their dogs disturbed by lighting explosives in my driveway late into the night, I figured I would sit down and do a little reading and writing, combing through what other writers and thinkers have to say about this funny little concept of independence.

“What is freedom? The power to live as one wishes”

Marcus Tullius Cicero, often just referred to as Cicero, was a Roman statesman, orator, lawyer, and philosopher (among other occupations) who lived between 106 BCE and 43 BCE.

The quote used as the heading of the section is from Cicero’s writings, specifically his “dialogues.” Roman dialogues had their roots in Greek tradition, drawing heavily upon philosophical dialogues (such as those employed by Socrates and Plato to convey their ideas and teachings). They use a question-driven rhetorical approach to explore ideas and concepts.

What is a man? What is the meaning of life? How do we know the gods guide us?

Throughout a dialogue, rhetoricians present a series of assumptions and then question them to determine what can be known, proven, disproven, or accepted as truth pending further discoveries. I’m oversimplifying a bit, and I’m sure my undergrad ethics professor would be shaking his head if I turned in that explanation for an essay, but that’s okay– I’ve been out of undergrad for a long-ass time. Aside from the occasional dream in which I have to turn in an assignment lest my degree be revoked, I seldom concern myself with professorial approval these days.

My point is: in Cicero’s tradition of oratory, questions are posed and then assumptions are examined and unpacked. And over the many years since Cicero penned his question– What is freedom? The power to live as one wishes– many other writers, thinkers, and artists have engaged in flavors of Roman dialogue, pressuring and questioning the same question and assumptions to arrive at different conclusions.

Nelson Mandela in Dialogue with Cicero

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela occupies a unique position in the global imagination—simultaneously a historical figure and a moral archetype, a man who transformed from revolutionary to reconciler without losing his radical edge. His 27 years of imprisonment under South Africa's apartheid regime didn't diminish his vision; they refined it. His cultural significance extends far beyond South Africa's borders because he represents something increasingly rare: proof that transformative change is possible without sacrificing one's moral center.

The Dialogue Between Cicero and Mandela

If we imagine Mandela encountering Cicero's definition of freedom—"the power to live as one wishes"—we might picture him nodding thoughtfully before offering a gentle but firm correction. Cicero's formulation, emerging from the privileged position of a Roman senator, assumes that individual desire and collective good naturally align. But Mandela, writing from the depths of apartheid's brutality, understood that true freedom requires a fundamental reimagining of what it means to wish and to live.

His response—"to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others"—doesn't reject Cicero's insight so much as it completes it. Where Cicero sees freedom as the absence of external constraint, Mandela sees it as the presence of mutual recognition. The Roman philosopher's "power to live as one wishes" becomes, through Mandela's lens, the responsibility to wish for a world where such power is universally accessible. It's a shift from freedom as personal liberation to freedom as collective transformation.

Mark Twain Chimes In

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain occupies a distinctly American position as a beloved national satirist—the court jester with a license to speak uncomfortable truths about the contradictions of democracy. Writing in the Gilded Age, when American ideals were colliding spectacularly with American realities, Twain perfected the art of the double-edged compliment. His genius lay in exposing hypocrisy not through righteous indignation but through deadpan observation, letting the absurdity speak for itself. He became the voice of American self-awareness, the writer who could celebrate and skewer the nation's promises simultaneously, understanding that the distance between our stated values and lived practices is often where the most important truths hide.

Twain's Sardonic Response:

If Mandela's response to Cicero deepened the philosophical conversation about freedom, Twain's contribution would be to puncture its earnestness with a dose of pragmatic skepticism. Where Cicero championed individual liberty and Mandela called for collective responsibility, Twain might chuckle at both men's apparent faith in human nature. His observation about Americans possessing "freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either" reads like a gentle mockery of the entire philosophical enterprise—a recognition that all our high-minded theorizing about freedom means little if we lack the courage to actually exercise it.

But Twain's cynicism cuts deeper than mere pessimism. He's not dismissing the value of freedom so much as highlighting the psychological barriers that prevent us from claiming it. While Cicero assumes we naturally desire to live freely and Mandela calls us to extend that freedom to others, Twain suggests that most people prefer the comfortable illusion of freedom to its messy reality. His "prudence" is really cowardice dressed up in respectability—the tendency to mistake silence for wisdom and conformity for civility. In Twain's formulation, the enemy of freedom isn't external oppression but internal self-censorship, the quiet capitulation that happens when we choose comfort over courage.

Noor Hindi Highlights The Ongoing Need for Freedom Today

Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

seconds before becoming daisies.

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It’s so beautiful, the moon.

They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.

He watches Al Jazeera all day.

I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.

Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.

When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.

One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

-”Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” by Noor Hindi

Noor Hindi enters this philosophical conversation about freedom not as another voice in the dialogue but as someone demanding we acknowledge the violence that makes such leisurely discussions possible. Her poem "Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying" operates as both art and accusation, rejecting the traditional boundaries between aesthetic contemplation and political urgency. Where Cicero, Mandela, and Twain theorize about freedom from positions of relative intellectual safety, Hindi writes from the immediacy of ongoing genocide—a context that renders abstract philosophical inquiry not just irrelevant but obscene. Her work represents a generation of artists who refuse to separate craft from conscience, who understand that in a world where "children throw rocks at Israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies," the luxury of apolitical poetry becomes a form of complicity.

Freedom as Survival, Not Philosophy:

If we imagine Hindi encountering our previous thinkers' definitions of freedom, her response would be visceral and immediate. Cicero's "power to live as one wishes" becomes grotesquely inadequate when applied to Palestinians who "don't see the moon from jail cells and prisons." Mandela's call to "respect and enhance the freedom of others" takes on urgent specificity when those others are being systematically erased. Even Twain's cynical observation about Americans' "prudence never to practice" their freedoms gains new weight when Hindi declares, "I know I'm American because when I walk into a room something dies"—a recognition that American identity itself is built on the destruction of others' possibility for freedom.

Hindi's poem doesn't offer a competing definition of freedom so much as it exposes the conditions that make such definitions possible. Her line "One day, I'll write about the flowers like we own them" contains both longing and rage—the desire for the kind of freedom that would allow for beauty without the constant backdrop of death, and the recognition that such freedom is currently the privilege of those whose survival isn't in question. In Hindi's formulation, freedom isn't a philosophical concept to be debated but a material condition to be fought for, not through dialogue but through the radical act of refusing to let atrocity become normalized. Her promise to "haunt you forever" transforms the traditional role of the poet from observer to witness, from entertainer to conscience—a voice that won't allow us the comfort of looking away.

This conversation about freedom doesn't end with Hindi's poem—it begins there. Because if we've learned anything from this philosophical relay race, it's that each generation must answer the question anew: What does it mean to be free? Cicero's individual liberty, Mandela's collective responsibility, Twain's cynical honesty, and Hindi's urgent witness all live inside that question, demanding we choose which voice we'll amplify with our actions.

The question now is whether we'll write about flowers while others become daisies, or whether we'll finally practice the freedoms we claim to cherish.