(Applause)
I'm here to talk about freedom and I'm very excited about it.
Do you remember the first time you realized that you were free?
That you're really free?
The first time I even knew what freedom was,
I got lost in a library and I was reading stories
about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth,
and freedom was so clear and so easy to understand.
And then I grew up and I got complicated like everything else.
And I started to look for freedom in everything I saw,
I tried to listen for it.
And one day I was driving in the car and I heard on the radio Janis Joplin,
and she's saying that famous lyric "Freedom is nothing left to lose."
And I thought to myself, "Is that how I have to experience freedom?
Do I have to get to the edge,
lose everything, give everything up to really experience freedom?"
See, freedom had become this esoteric, cerebral idea
that I couldn't quite touch.
It was like love, right?
You can feel it, but you can't touch it, you can't hold it in your hands.
And I read this, the great agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll,
he wrote it beautifully when he said,
"What light is to the eyes, what air is to the lungs,
what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man."
And I thought, "Oh, this is amazing!
I cannot get enough of this freedom stuff."
And I kept looking for and looking for in everything I did,
and so I went to law school.
And when other people met their partners,
I met the Constitution.
I got to know the Constitution and I flirted with it
and I tried it on.
I explored the freedom of religion.
I tried on the freedom of speech,
and my family would say too much.
I assembled, I petitioned, I wrote to the press, I even shot a gun.
I loved it, I loved everything about freedom.
And what I came to find
was that freedom in the Constitution was very personal, very intimate,
something different than what they had taught me.
The Constitution didn't just set up the power of government,
it didn't just set up the structure or the architecture of government.
It spoke to me personally,
it spoke to all of us personally.
It was our guardian, it was our bedfellow.
But it wasn't until I started teaching at an open enrollment college
where students are anywhere from 15 to 75 years of age and even older,
and they come to a sanctuary of sorts,
it's where everyone has access to education.
It's an amazing idea, right?
And it was really through my students
that I understood this new emerging idea of freedom
and what I would come to understand what freedom is now.
Let me tell you about my students because they're absolutely fantastic.
They're gritty, they're self determined,
they're intellectually curious,
they're self-reliant, they're absolutely beautiful.
They also carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.
They are husbands, they are wives, they are sons, they are daughters,
they are caregivers,
and they are seeking education carrying all that with them.
And they come to me and we start to talk about freedom
and we start to explore the Constitution,
and they distance themselves from freedom.
And at first, I couldn't quite tell what was happening,
and it started to reveal itself
that freedom is a few generations away from my students,
that hunger for freedom,
to what that feels like,
and that they also connected freedom
with some of the ugliness and divisiveness of modern politics,
that they related the two,
and so they were shy with freedom.
So I introduced them to the Constitution,
and they came to understand what I had come to understand.
That it was very personal to them,
very intimate.
And that the Constitution didn't grant them their rights.
It gave them a shield, it protected them.
That they had been free all along.
And that they didn't have to look that hard,
I didn't have to look that hard.
You don't have to look that hard for freedom.
That it's inside of us.
And they came to know that truth
that every single person in this room knows.
That deep inside of us, each one of us is so magnificent,
so valuable, so unique,
that we don't need a constitution to give us freedom.
We have it as our birthright.
Not just as Americans, but as the human race.
And so, as students come to know that freedom
and they try that freedom on,
they did it in unique and different ways.
But they had to come to a realization first.
That inherent in freedom is responsibility.
That's pretty heavy, especially for these students
already carrying the weight of the world around.
And responsibility has gotten a bad rap.
We think of responsibility as this weight,
and that somehow what Janis Joplin said,
that we've got to get rid of all the duties
and get rid of all the encumbrances in our lives to really experience freedom,
and that's absolutely not true.
And anyone of us at traffics and responsibilities knows
that to embrace responsibility is probably the most freeing thing
that any one of us can do,
because then you can chart your own course,
you can set your own sail,
you can choose a life that speaks to you.
And so students, once they discover their freedom,
once they define freedom,
they have to embrace responsibility.
And that responsibility first means to love and respect themselves,
and then freedom directs them to respect others,
to tolerate and to be kind and to exalt civility.
Because freedom, no matter what we define it as,
no matter how it comes out,
has never meant
to be less than those tenants of humanity.
And so, once they embrace freedom,
and they feel the responsibility,
it leads them to the most amazing places.
It leads them to service.
And I just want to say that these students know,
and I know that the Constitution is flawed,
and it's flawed in its design and its application.
But there's a tenderness and grace that it offers each of us.
And when you can find that you're a bit of freedom
in the Constitution,
you can find that intimacy,
it leads you to the most amazing places.
One night, I couldn't sleep
and I did what all the literature says not to do,
I opened my email in the middle of the night
thinking that was going to help me sleep, right?
And I received
an email from a student I had had a few semesters ago.
And the email was both an apology of sorts and a manifesto of sorts.
And in the note, he revealed to me
that he had not been sober much of my class,
but that he was on his 30th day of sobriety,
and that he was reconnecting with a son as a man, as a father,
and that he was using the one piece of my class
that he remembered about freedom to claim his life back,
to make his life his own.
And I realized it was that unique expression of freedom
that was really emerging.
It wasn't the stuff of government,
it was the stuff that was inside of us.
He was taking his freedom and claiming a new life.
He was not just breaking the bonds of government,
he was breaking the narrative
that all of us have of past hurts, past abuses,
societal cues, disenfranchisement, whatever comes with us.
He was using his intimate relationship with freedom
to express himself, to claim his life.
But then, he ended with a piece
that is really the piece that speaks to me,
that's really the piece that I want to share with you today.
He had used his free will to claim a sobriety,
he had used his free will to connect with his son,
and then, he asked in closing where he could serve others,
where could he dedicate his life.
So, as exhausted as he was,
he was seeking to serve others.
And that diversity of freedom is seen in almost all my students.
That when they come to find freedom,
it could be the artist that seeks to express themselves
and celebrate or heal using their art,
it could be the entrepreneur that's seeking that economic liberty,
it comes out in all different ways,
but it always leads to the same thing.
When we define freedom, however we define it,
it embraces responsibility and it leads to service,
and that is the transformative nature of the Constitution,
and it's a much different story that any one of us have ever been told
in civics class.
So, I see my students when they come in
and they define their own freedom for themselves,
and they embrace responsibility,
and they serve others in the community,
and they serve in our community.
That freedom of expression
adds to a national murmur that we all are listening to right now,
that our institutions are gracefully trying to navigate,
where we have to take these freedoms that are individual to each of us
and they compete,
and we have to figure out how to resolve that conflict.
And so, those freedoms of expression are meeting that national murmur,
and they're coming together
and they're part of this great movement of change
that we're all living through.
That freedom doesn't just belong in the books,
it doesn't just belong in the parades,
that it belongs to each of us individually,
and that it always drives us to responsibility
and always drives us to service.
And that is beautiful and transformative.
And it's not just an American ideal,
it's a universal and shared idea.
So, next time, when we hear the debate
about other countries
and other individuals seeking their liberties,
perhaps we can open ourselves
that that's not just the stuff of economic crises,
that that is the making of human rights.
And I know that we like to see grand gestures of change,
and that we look for these big pictures
of how the world is changing and how freedom should look,
but I think that we see
the most beautiful expressions of liberty
in the quiet everyday expressions of service,
and that those service change the world.
And I'm excited and turned on
to see where the whispers of the Constitution speak to you,
how they reveal your freedom and your service.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Elizabeth Markie: Could you stay just a second?
Tara Hechlik: Okay.
EM: So, Tara, I would imagine
that you get asked a lot of questions about the Constitution.
Do you mind if I ask a couple?
TH: Of course!
EM: I'm wondering how free are we in America?
TH: This is actually a question that a lot of my students ask
because we think we're the barometer of freedom,
that were the gold standard, yeah?
But there's a number of indexes that we know of
that actually indicate that, in terms of economic liberty,
which is the basis of a lot of our freedoms,
we're actually twelfth in the world,
and when it comes to civil liberties,
those are the liberties that we really like,
that we're really close to, we're actually 21st in the world.
And that's because this idea of freedom that we're talking about,
that we're defining,
other countries have picked it up where we started and they ran,
and they learned from those weaknesses and those errors of our ways,
and they exalt it.
So, to answer your question, Elizabeth, we are free,
but our colleagues in other countries
are actually developing freedom in a much different way.
EM: I have one word. TH: Okay, okay.
(Laughter)
EM: One more question for Tara.
Does the Supreme Court decision regarding marriage
mean that the First Amendment of freedom of religion isn't important?
TH: So, you've all been watching the news, yeah?
We've got a Kentucky clerk that is sitting in jail.
And we have a lot of rhetoric about the freedom of religion
that somehow the Constitution belongs to conservatives,
or belongs to liberals.
And what our Supreme Court has said in June
is that it belongs--
liberty belongs to you,
but that no liberties are above each other.
So that the freedom of religion does not trump equality,
and one brand of freedom of religion does not trump the other.
So, I think what we're discovering
is that equality is paramount with liberty.
Right?
And that we don't have to compete those liberties,
we just have to exalt equality.
EM: Thank you, Tara.
(Applause) TH: Thank you.