Take the Liberty

“Take the Liberty” sounds iconoclastic, like the words take and liberty cancel each other out.

In our parlance today, saying you took the liberty means that you undertook some kind of action without asking permission, but where it would have been customary to ask first. There’s a kind of baked-in assumption that you’re doing the person a favor here by not wasting their time and just doing whatever it is, and that the person you would have asked would have approved anyway, so you’re doing them the favor of not asking them.

The funny thing is that liberty can be taken away, and it’s not at all like doing the person a favor. In any nation in the entire world, if a person is convicted of a crime, they are subject to lose certain liberties. The state will just take the liberty right away from you.

Another person can take your liberty from you, too, and they can do it in a way that’s not at all a favor to you. For millennia, slavers took away all conceivable liberty from individuals, and they did this tens of millions of times.

Human trafficking is still far too prominent in the world, although we are gradually heading in the right direction. Still, modern-day slavery is prevalent, if not as visible as the chattel slavery of the fairly recent past.

Kidnapping is also a way your liberty can be taken by another person, and while slavery focuses on extracting labor from the person whose liberty has been taken, kidnapping also takes those same liberties away.

I grew up as a white kid in the American South, and I think that helped me avoid having many liberties taken away as a young troublemaker. My Black friends and classmates were frequently punished for the same offenses I routinely got away with, but it was hard for me to understand why this could be when I was very young.

Even still, my liberties were taken from me here and there. When I was perhaps 18 years old, I looked something like this:

Awkward! And also, apparently: threatening enough so that an undercover cop once pulled me over because he thought he smelled something funny, or so the claim went. Once that 1984 Ford Escort was on the side of the highway, said cop yanked everything from my glove box out and scattered it on the floor of my car, and did the same with every other item in the car. He didn’t find anything illegal in my car (because there wasn’t anything illegal in there), and so he left me with a warning and a giant mess to clean up.

I was supposed to feel lucky to get away with a warning, and I guess I probably did: I understood this situation could have gone far worse for me. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of slowly burning anger at the indignity and (albeit mild) injustice.

Years later, when I was in Brazil for the first time, I was trying to make a phone call back to the states from a pay phone. This was during a time when international cell phone service was prohibitively expensive, and I couldn’t even imagine trying to make a call from a phone like that.

Two Rio de Janiero cops approached me with hands on pistols, asking me about drogas. I told them I was just trying to make a phone call, but I mostly told them this in English. This was a problem since both of these men spoke only Portuguese. They seemed very skeptical, saying things like, “Oh right sure, you don’t understand what we’re saying. How convenient.”

One cop decided it was a good idea to shine a flashlight down my shorts and take a peek at my junk. I think it might be fair to say I had my liberty taken in that moment.

Fortunately for me, one phrase I did speak well was, “Eu so gringo estupido!” This got me laughs from both of my would-be captors, and when they saw my Brazilian Portuguese for Travelers mini-book in my pocket, they let me go.

Now, this is not a “woe is me” story! I don’t want you to think that after reading this. Instead, I feel as though both of these incidents helped me to build empathy for folks who are in similar (but far worse) positions.

I feel very lucky in the grand scheme of things not to have had more liberties taken from me, and I’m very cognizant of just how fortunate I’ve been to avoid much more harsh violations of personal freedom and liberty. Still, whenever it happens to you personally, it has to stick in your craw a bit, and whenever this happens, I feel much more connected to the people in the world who have it so much worse than me.

Now it’s your turn: have you ever had the feeling that your liberty was being taken away? If it’s not too painful to share, I’d love to hear it today.

And, have you ever thought about how funny the phrase take the liberty really is?