Tag Archives: Freedom from Fear

A photo from the upper deck at Kauffman Stadium looking down toward the baseball field during a Kansas City Royals game in July 2025.

Embodied Patriotism

Embodied Patriotism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, on the patriotism we live in our ordinary lives.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, on the patriotism we live in our ordinary lives.

This Monday, after a long day working on my dissertation I went with my parents to Kauffman Stadium to see the Kansas City Royals play the first game in this week’s series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Of the many things that I think of when I see the Pirates, memories of the weekend I spent in Pittsburgh in January 2020, or memories of watching them with my grandmother play the Cubs on WGN in my youth, I have a slight soft spot for the Pirates as a fellow legacy nineteenth-century team (1887) in the National League Central alongside my Cubs (1876), the Reds (1890), and the Cardinals (1892). The great Irish American artist Gene Kelly often said that he took up dancing to meet girls and to be agile and athletic so he could play outfield for the Pirates, his hometown team.

On this particular Monday, once we finished our walk into the stadium, bought our dinners and bottles of water, we made our way up to the top level of the stadium, the View Level to watch the game. I broke off from the rest of my family for a few minutes when we made it up to the 400s level to buy myself a brat. I didn’t realize though that the pregame ceremonies were reaching their conclusion with the march of the color guard and the performance of the national anthem. I consider myself patriotic in my own way; I hope you’ve seen in the last six months on this blog that I strive to elevate my fellow countrymen, my fellow humans in fact, through evocations of all the tremendous things we are capable of doing, of the extraordinary acts of ordinary people.[1] So, as the singer began her tune, I looked around at the people around me to see what I should do. At that moment I was at the register paying for my brat (everything is self-checkout now), yet as I saw no one else at the registers beside me were stopping to make our salute it occurred to me that nothing could be more American, dare I say more patriotic, than engaging in commerce with overpriced foods and drink that’s probably not good for any of us. I quickly finished my purchase and stepped back from the register and took a place beside a group of fellow millennials who held their right hands over their hearts, as we’re taught to do.

Throughout the game, a strong showing by the Royals who hit in 9 runs over the Pirates 3, I thought about this brat purchase during the national anthem and felt resolute in my decision. There are people who I know who take the anthem very seriously to the point of zealotry. In my many years of attending baseball games and soccer matches I’ve often wondered what would happen if someone chose to keep their hands at their sides or even remain seated during the anthem? We saw the harsh reaction of the clamorous cacophony when Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem a decade ago. At the time I was ambivalent yet now having heard more stories of oppression and promises unkept I appreciate what he did. I believe this question of how free we are to patriotically express discontent in civic rituals is essential to the vitality of a democracy. I’ve often found the crafted rituals which the Royals put between innings to be at times bordering the ludicrous. This is especially true in 2025 after the Royals ruined their relationship with so many of us Kansas Citians with how they misled us and took advantage of us in this year’s stadium sales tax vote. My distrust of the team is why I effectively retired the Royals cap that I bought only two years ago at another visit to Kauffman Stadium.

We embody our rituals by wearing American flags on our clothes and demanding unquestioning patriotism in this American life. Here I’m adopting Céline Carayon’s notion of embodied language in her 2019 book Eloquence Embodied about early colonial French communications and relations with Indigenous Americans through gestures and visual language.[2] Today in the United States our patriotism is just as often meant to be blood-red flowing within our bodies as it is worn on our chests and loudly proclaimed with often poorly sung renditions of the national anthem, a hymn requiring professional training to perform. It is meant to be shouted in unquestioning proclamations of American freedom even as that liberty seems ever more fleeting under the combined weight of a cruel-minded governing majority and an even crueler corporate elite that has created so much of the embodied rituals which define American culture in the 21st century. These rituals, always sponsored by some robber baron and crafted by their public relations department, sing proudly of American freedom all while ensuring their own profits at the expense of the American people’s own freedom from want and fear. We embody our patriotism in what we purchase and where. Earlier that day, looking for a late afternoon pastry, I ended up at my local Whole Foods. Their bakery is good; the chocolate croissants are about what you’d expect for a gargantuan corporation’s attempt at mimicry of a Parisian classic. Yet as I bought a slice of pizza that caught my eye thinking how I might stop here for pizza by the slice more often I felt a pang of guilt after all there’s a good local pizzeria, Pizza 51, just across the street and several more within walking distance. Even as bakeries go as fair as Whole Foods is during the morning rush I would much rather go to McLain’s, the Roasterie, or Heirloom, all local bakeries within walking distance of my family home and along the route I was driving yesterday afternoon. Yet where Whole Foods won was that they forego the usual bakery hours and keep baking pastries in the afternoons whereas the others are usually low on their morning batches or already closed for the day. I’ve known for most of my life that these big corporate chains put tremendous stress on small local businesses; in fact I’ve flatly refused to shop at Walmart for this very reason, only buying a couple of bottles of water at one in the Kansas City suburbs once in 2020 when my Dad’s old truck broke down outside of it during the evening rush hour under a hot summer sun.

The America that I love seems more and more fraught the further from walkable neighborhoods and into the suburbs and exurbs you go. This is where most Americans have built their lives in common isolation living in mansions of rest surrounded by moats of artificially green grass regardless of how dry the local climate may be. It’s a life spent driving individually in vehicles increasingly resembling The Princess Bride’s rodents of unusual size in their environmental dangers. Several months ago, I had a bad argument with an attendant at a car wash in a nearby suburb because I ended up in the members’ lane on accident. I told the teenager working there that I made the mistake because there wasn’t a sign that I could see in my Mazda where the two lanes split (the big overhead sign is blocked by a dumpster from my lower line of sight) while the guy kept telling me that I can’t pay in the lane I was in. I was angry because the way that place was built favored the minivans, SUVs, and trucks that most people drive at the expense of those of us who still drive sedans. Yet I lost my temper because when the management got involved in our deteriorating conversation they shrugged off my suggestion that the row of ground-level signs standing outside their toll booth ought to be placed where the lanes split saying “that’s something for corporate to decide.” This is where that America of neighbors seems to be at least dormant to me; rather than making decisions that will benefit all of us together we instead more often choose inaction rather than risk our own individually precarious position. I grew up admiring the likes of Daniel Burnham and was proud as a young kid to say I was from Carl Sandburg’s City of Big Shoulders with big ideas and big ambitions. I’m just as proud to have witnessed firsthand the renaissance that Kansas City has experienced since the millennium. Those sorts of dreams and ambitions are what make me proud to embody our shared patriotism when I feel we’ve warranted it. I prefer the embodied patriotism my parents and grandparents taught me which as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found grew out of the progressive and city beautiful movements of a century ago and felt their greatest expression during FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. That is my America, the America of neighbors standing up for each other. I see that America every day in my neighborhood where people say hello to each other when walking down the sidewalks or on the Trolley Trail. It’s for that America that I feel pride is warranted, that America which we should be working to rebuild by reconnecting our car-dependent suburbs and neighborhoods, by forcing us to spend time with each other again, to be social again.

[1] That’s one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written.

[2] Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

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Freedom from Fear

Credit: Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Freedom from Fear – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In this episode I talk about how FDR’s Four Freedoms from his 1941 State of the Union is pertinent to today.

When I worked as a Teaching Assistant for the US History II class (1877-present) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the week that we’d discuss the Great Depression and the New Deal, I would always highlight President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and spend a good deal of time discussing them, what they meant to Americans in the 1940s, and what they mean to us today. Chief among these for me has always been the most abstract yet primeval of these Four Freedoms: Freedom from Fear.

At the time he announced the Four Freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union Address, 81 years ago this week, FDR saw Freedom from Fear as “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor –– anywhere in the world.” 

This spoke as profoundly to a world plunged into the worst war yet known in human history as it does to us today in a world where the instability of war has of late shown its face both in the form of terrorism and paramilitary attacks as well as in more conventional fighting around the globe. Yet now as I write this, headlines in the major papers and other prominent news outlets continue to warn of aggression from the likes of China or Russia against Taiwan and Ukraine, both conflicts that surely, we in the United States would be likely to involve ourselves in.

Yet beyond the terrible yet over-glorified world of weapons and war, I often think of this fourth freedom in other social contexts all the same. It saddens me, yet still doesn’t surprise me to know that now, nearly as distant from FDR’s presidency as Lincoln’s was from the Continental Congress, we still are a country that lives in fear of enemies both foreign and, yes, domestic as well. This cycle of fear has led to so many of our fellow citizens buying guns for self-defense, often in response to the frequent mass shootings and other homicides that are a wrathful shadow over our lives. 

This cycle of fear has kept us indebted to our for-profit health insurance industry, without which we couldn’t afford to pay the medical bills that result from the healthcare that keeps us alive. I thank God that my employer has good quality health insurance, because honestly if I were given the choice of surviving or going into severe debt to pay for an emergency surgery or other procedure, I’d have to really think about that before making a decision. What value is there in life if you can’t really live because all your earnings are going to pay off not only your debt but also the interest on that debt?

Fear can drive us to achieve better things, to overcome our fears, yet it can also inspire us to do terrible things. Fear of the other, fear of difference, is the root cause of so many problems that beset our country and humanity at large. I study this in the context of how the idea of the savage was understood in Renaissance natural history in my professional capacity as a PhD candidate in history.

One of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: Voyager provides a clue as to how we could truly achieve the dream of this fourth freedom. In the second season episode “The Thaw” Captain Janeway and the crew of Voyager take on an AI that was created by the imaginations of a group of interstellar settlers who put themselves into cryogenic stasis for decades. That AI ended up manifesting itself as Fear itself and proceeded to terrorize the settlers and eventually the Starfleet officers from Voyager who enter the stasis chambers to try and deactivate it from the inside. At the end of the day, Captain Janeway herself confronts Fear and proceeds to give the best argument for power that I’ve ever heard; power only lasts if its authority is unchallenged. Fear only lasts if we are afraid. At the end of the day, the answer it seems is coming to terms with our own agency, our own ability to make decisions for ourselves.

We as the United States have become paralyzed by fear; there are reforms and changes we really should make but the people who could make them more often say it’s too dangerous to disrupt the status quo, to shake the foundations if only slightly. To quote another President, this time Mr. Lincoln from his 1862 “Annual Message to Congress”, “As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” Times have changed, and with them the ways we deal with our government and its relationship with the people must change as well. We need universal healthcare; we need electoral reform that will fully protect the right to vote enshrined in the Voting Rights Act. We need to make the changes necessary in our educational system, policing, and in nearly every other facet of our society to tackle bigotry in every venomous form it takes. We need to rethink our immigration laws, unscramble them, welcome in people who want to become our fellow citizens, our friends, our neighbors, who want to contribute to our society by their presence within our borders.

Eventually, I dearly hope, we’ll finally achieve FDR’s fourth freedom. I look forward to a day when I, and everyone around me has nothing to fear. I’m a teacher, admittedly in higher ed rather than in K-12, but a teacher nonetheless, and here in the United States being a teacher means knowing that there’s always a chance someone is going to decide they need to attack the students, faculty, and staff at your school or university. In my classroom, while my first priority is to teach, in that situation my first priority is to ensure my students’ safety. I long for the day when I won’t have to worry about someone attacking my classroom, and frankly I know there’s a decent chance even if I don’t experience a school shooting firsthand that I’m likely to experience a lockdown because of one, and not just the frequent drills we did for school shooters when I was in high school.

We fear each other because we don’t trust each other, and a country comprised of citizens who are too afraid to trust one another is a country in peril. Everything that I said today could well be interpreted as a partisan statement. Think about that: fear itself has been weaponized for partisan purposes to such an extent that the few solutions to that fear are themselves inherently partisan, fundamentally political. What have we done to ourselves to get to this point?

To turn again to President Roosevelt, freedom from fear “is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” Make this my hope, my prayer even, that if my generation and the generations to follow are remembered for anything it’s at long last overcoming those innate human fears that have driven us since the first Cain of our legendary past cast their stones against their fellow humans.

In the podcast version of this post, the recording of FDR’s 1941 State of the Union Address, his “Four Freedoms Speech” comes from the Archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York which is operated by the National Archives and Records Administration. I’d also like to thank my friend the immensely talented voice actor Michael Ashcraft for his giving life to President Lincoln’s words in this episode.