Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Sleeping Beauty from the small Briar Rose series
(circa 1890)

"I vote for four simple freedoms again. Amen!"

In the months leading up to the United States entering the already raging World War, President Franklin Roosevelt articulated what he labeled The Four Freedoms in his January 1941 State of the Union Address. He intended these points to inspire a vision of a post-war world, where freedom would once again rule. These points were aspirational then, embodying what he hoped could be the hopes and dreams of those whose faith in freedom might well be severely challenged, even discouraged, over the upcoming period. This speech came nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, when we were still squabbling over whether to lend our support to Britain. Roosevelt decided to try to settle the questions about what we thought we might be fighting for, signaling an end to our period of isolationism.

He enumerated four “essential” human freedoms: Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of every person to worship God in their own way, Freedom from want, meaning economic understandings that secure a healthy peacetime life for all, and Freedom from fear, specifically a worldwide reduction of armaments to prevent physical aggression. These Four Freedoms became the underpinning governing our eventual engagement in that terrible conflict, and guided our involvement in the creation of the United Nations, which incorporated these four freedoms into its preamble of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. These intentions deeply influenced the world that I was born into, the one I felt proud to be a part of, for they outlined what decency meant to me and to the ever-expanding free world.

Then this once bastion of freedom began pursuing greatness. It traded in its once-reliable cow for a hill of magic beans. It promised to set about writing wrongs, with our by then beleaguered Four Freedoms filling in playing the part of the wrongs. They called themselves the MAGAs, the Make America Great Again crowd, and they were, if anything, inordinately proud of their passion and their sincere lack of compassion for others. They perceived mortal enemies where nobody had seen them before, at least since just after our divisive Civil War. They proposed Four Oppressions as worthy successors to their forebear Four Freedoms, arguing, if not eloquently, that the world should be divided between the worthy and the others, with their chosen people considered the worthiest: what others labeled Deplorables.

TheFourOppressions proclaimed freedom for a few, at onerous cost to the many. They proposed severely limiting the freedom of speech and expression, proposing a freedom they reserved for themselves, a freedom to squelch. This amounted to a capricious oppression, one exclusively visited upon their critics and sundry truth-tellers. They reserved the right to lie their fool heads off with absolute impunity, and practiced it with near absolute inanity.

They feigned a religious fervor previously unseen outside of a few of the more militant Muslim sects. They practiced an Old Testament Christianity, falsely insisting that our country was founded as a Christian Nation, then employed the temerity to redefine it as such. Other traditions were characterized as un-American and therefore lesser than what they characterized as The One True Religion, an oppression that history had repeatedly proven false and not once found true. Their religion was predicated upon this great lie.

They instituted targeted austerity programs intended to punish those incapable of fending for themselves. They taxed the poor to benefit the rich, and cut the wealthiest’s taxes in a long-before discredited cargo cult belief that prosperity quite naturally trickles down from great wealth. Never in the history of the world so far had that belief ever been held to be true, yet it was the bedrock belief beneath this third Oppression, The Necessity of Want, the Freedom To Oppress The Poorest. We capriciously levied tariffs on utterly innocent trading partners, deepening economic inequality and severely wounding ourselves. The Oppression of the poor to make everyone wealthier joined its counterparts to further erode what we’d previously known as great freedoms.

The freedom from fear became a gleeful Oppression intending to focus our nation’s great strength to inflict fear on innocents, especially those with no way to properly defend themselves. We strived to become a bully nation, one feared rather than respected, one no longer trusted to keep our word. We deliberately became a renegade nation, reviled by former friends and allies, oppressing ourselves for fun and obscene profit. We blew innocent fishermen out of international waters, then refused to provide proof that they were somehow international drug traffickers. We started a war of choice that crippled the world economy on little more than an arrogant whim. We were much more miserable as a result.

So, those are our Four Oppressions:

The Absolute Freedom to Squelch Speech,

The Absolute Freedom To Be An Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian Nationalist,

The Absolute Freedom to Actively Oppress the Poor for Being Poor,

and The Absolute Freedom to Inflict Fear.

Quite the accomplishment, don’t you think, to flip our identity from aspiring peacemaker to the chief oppressor nation in the world? Greatness necessarily brings complication. What seemed straightforward and simple as a freedom gets tangled when transformed into an oppression. The need for defense spending soars, and the need to behave defensively around other nations becomes prominent. We remember when a simple vision for our future inspired rather than terrified. Now, we experience a simple-minded vision utterly undermining what we once understood constituted freedom. If this is what greatness costs, I vote for four simple freedoms again. Amen!

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz