The Freedom Tax
The Short Term Cost of Liberation
You have probably heard by now, or already knew, that the Montgomery Bus Boycotts lasted 381 days. Forty-thousand Black bus riders, representing 75% of the city’s bus riders, walked, carpooled, or took 10 cent taxis until demands were met. Black taxi drivers reduced their rate to the bus rate in support of the protest.
Yes, the good citizens of Montgomery faced violence, but they also galvanized Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s coalition and garnered national and international attention as the earliest mass Civil Rights protest in the United States.
Our freedoms are currently under attack at a very large scale. The United States is doing what it has always done by tearing apart families of color and scarring the DNA of equity-seeking people for generations to come. The mass deportations of Hispanic and Latinx people is unconscionable. What are we doing to protect them, our neighbors, and ourselves? Who among us are pivoting like the Black taxi drivers? How many of us are willing to endure a comparable inconvenience to walking versus taking a bus?
I will not stop beating the drum of voting with your dollars, at the very least. We must not fund our own oppression. No idea where to begin? Start here. If you have a white body in the USA and you are willing to take your protest to the streets, do it. Those streets are no place for people of color right now. If you feel safe protesting, you are lucky. If you feel safe existing in the United States, you are even luckier. But no matter who you are, you should not be funding anyone’s oppression, least of all your own.
As of now, the SAVE Act has passed the House and looms over the future voting rights several million Americans. Do we really want to wait and see how deep this abyss goes? Do we want to wait until the threat is in our foyer?…..because it’s already at the door. Project 2025 is actively in play and we need to make sure we are spending our money with small, local, and values aligned companies to the best of our ability. I don’t want us to look back and wish we had.
Which creature comfort, which convenience is worth your freedom? Which privilege or luxury is worth your friends’ freedom? Is there an app that’s worth another family being deported? Is there a movie that’s worth your sister not being able to vote? Is there a store that is more convenient than than your grandma’s access to Medicare?
These are the calculations we are failing to consider. You think the price of goods and groceries is high now? What’s your plan for bare store shelves and obscene prices? We must move with great intention now. We always should have but we were lulled into a distracted slumber. We’ve become the sheeple depicted in so much sci-fi…drugged up on pharmaceuticals, exhausted from overwork, and just under-resourced enough to barely enjoy the luxuries we can finance on credit that we may never pay off.
What would you do differently if you only had six months to course correct history before the choices are reduced to a matter of survival? We should all behave as though we are there and and be mindful of our actions until the revolution is won. Demure is entirely optional.
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