December 14, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In 1847, abolitionist supporters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania invited William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to speak at the Dauphin County Court House. Forty miles to the south was Gettysburg, a small rural town of 2,400 people. In 16 years, it would become the site of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War as the Union Army turned away the advance of the Confederate Army into the north (Source).

Garrison (1805-1879) was the publisher of The Liberator, the foremost journal championing the banishment of slavery in the United States. Douglass (1818 – 1895) had been born into slavery and did not learn to read until he was a teenager. After escaping to freedom at the age of 20, he became a gifted speaker for the abolitionist cause (Source). Several anti-abolitionists were in the audience and gathered outside the court house. Garrison spoke for an hour, urging the assembly to honor the freedom and rights of all men promised by the Declaration of Independence. As soon as Douglass rose to speak, agitators pelted him with rotten eggs and yelled racial slurs. A security detail escorted both men from the court house. The Harrisburg police stood idly by as an angry mob threatened both men (Source).

This week I want to explore the axis of freedom and captivity. Douglass was one of perhaps 100,000 slaves that fled to northern states and Canada before the Civil War. In the same year as the Harrisburg event, more than 300,000 Irish emigrants crossed the Irish Channel to Liverpool in search of food. They were taking advantage of England’s poor laws which guaranteed them a couple of rice meals a day. The record breaking cold of the 1846-47 winter and the potato blight had killed the potato crop which served as both their primary food source and their money in an agrarian barter economy. A million more Irish emigrants fled to Canada, New York City and Boston. Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger is a good account of the famine.

Between those two poles of freedom and captivity are constraints and liberties. There are constraints of money, food and shelter, the basic needs of our survival. Sometimes those constraints reach extreme levels like the Irish experienced during the Great Famine. There are lesser constraints which make us feel as though we are trapped. We may feel captive to the indifference or incompetence of others, or frustrated by circumstances and rules that rob us of our capacity or autonomy.

We are accustomed to the temporary incapacity that an illness can bring. Some of us must endure autoimmune or degenerative diseases which permanently diminish our capacities. Alcoholics and drug addicts have inadvertently conditioned their bodies to crave a substance that keeps them trapped. They are both prisoner and warden, trapped in the walls of their physical need but holding the key of sobriety that will free them from their cell.

President Roosevelt cited four natural freedoms. Two of them are freedoms to do something, to speak freely and worship as we choose. The other two are freedoms from something, from want and fear. Liberties are freedoms of various degrees. To a teenager, freedom might be a car or some spending money. We may not be aware of a freedom until we lose it. There is a saying that good health is wasted on the young. Later in life, people realize that good health is a freedom that they took for granted.

In an ideal world, liberty and constraint should not be a zero sum game. Yet we often gain greater liberty at someone else’s constraint and sometimes without us being aware of it. Redlining was a euphemism for an official government policy adopted by the Federal Housing Authority in the 1930s. The agency drew up maps of urban areas which classified neighborhoods into four groups and was designed to keep racial groups separate. Areas where blacks and immigrants lived were marked as red, leading banks to deny mortgages or offer undesirable loan terms. People who lived in the more desirable green and blue neighborhoods did not want to be downgraded to yellow, indicating a declining area, because it affected their property values (Source). A constraint on some folks helped enhance the property values for other folks.

Another avenue I want to explore is trust. I think we tend to trust those who promise a freedom either from something or to something. We trust religious leaders who promise eternal salvation. For many of us, that is a freedom to and a freedom from. A journey to eternity and a relief from the burdens of this world. We trust healers of every sort because they promise us a freedom, a new capability or knowledge. They may promise a relief from the captivity of some emotional or physical pain. Now some of us may be very distrustful of most healers, but they proliferate because a sufficient number of people trust their message, their promise.

In the 1980s, First Lady Nancy Reagan launched a Just Say No campaign, a companion to her husband President Reagan’s War on Drugs. Many Just Say No clubs opened but the overly simplistic message evoked scorn in some of the young people the campaign targeted. Today, organizations like the Center for Humane Technology expose the public to the manipulative design of social media algorithms (Source). The American Psychological Association has issued more caution than warning (Source). This month, Australia banned social media use by teenagers under the age of 16 (Source). The social media company Reddit quickly sued, claiming that the ban is an infringement on free speech (Source).

Do teens trust these warnings? Do their parents? If a 20-year old working at a coffee shop cannot remember my order for more than five seconds, is that because the consumption of social media from an early age has destroyed their ability to focus? Or is it just a boring job? Whose interpretation should I trust?

Each of walks around with our own custom designed measuring stick, our own scales that we build over a lifetime. We use those unique tools to evaluate what we see, what we read, what we experience. Many times we want to reach conclusions that are simple and definitive, but anything we measure is only distinct because of the scale we use. When 12 jurors try to reach a consensus in a murder trial using their different yardsticks of evidence and ethics, innocence and guilt, we understand the complexity of our different evaluation systems. Events occur within a context and each of us pays attention to different aspects of any context.

Some people are free of any doubts in their own judgment while others are trapped by their self-doubt, their lack of trust in their own judgment. For some, that distrust can be debilitating. Should I do that, we ask? Am I being too hasty? What if I am wrong? Am I not fully considering the repercussions of my preference? On and on, we weave a busy web of questions and doubts that keep us trapped. We may tell ourselves that those doubts keep us safe and perhaps they do sometimes.

Do we trust our judgment as we get older? The founders who wrote the Constitution believed so, that others could trust our judgment as we grew older. Article I stipulates a minimum age of 25 to represent a district in the House and 33 to represent a state in the Senate (Source). When it was drafted, James Madison, a primary architect of the Constitution, was only 36, barely old enough to run for President.

Politicians are particularly blind to their misjudgments. To run for office, they must overcome self-doubt. Some become masters of that ability. They work and live in circles of consensus nested within each other like Russian dolls and far removed from the common realities of the very people they represent. The party system preserves incumbency. Most members of Congress are re-elected and that gives representatives the false impression that they are in touch with their constituency.

In the decades since the 1950s, public trust in government has declined. In a 1958 National Elections Survey, 73% of Americans thought government did the right thing all or most of the time. Recent polls indicate only 17% of Americans feel the same way (Source). Election funding now relies less on public trust and more on donations from wealthy donors. In 2024, political action committees (PACs) accounted for 65% of election spending (Source). Some are of the traditional type, subject to donation and spending limits. Others are Super PACs, independent organizations that can spend unlimited amounts on advertising and election activities as long as they don’t coordinate those activities with a political candidate.

Since Johnson’s Great Society began in the mid-1960s, federal programs have benefitted millions of Americans but have created a society dependent on these programs. The programs and the politicians who promote them overpromise and underdeliver, leading many to question the sincerity of those in government. Because many American families are dependent on those programs they are susceptible to the promises of a political huckster.

The founders built checks and balances into the Constitution to restrain the representatives of the people. Instead, it is the public who is restrained by a political system that does not hold representatives accountable to their constituents. As the public loses trust in their political system, that creates an opening for a political group to assume power after campaigning on a promise of change. Their gain in power may come at a cost of more constraints on voters.

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Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash