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Over this Labor Day I had a chance to think about the past and was going to write about the things we labor (wisely or foolishly) to achieve or own. The premise was a simple one or mere recollection of the human quirk of striving to get something we then quickly grow tired of. My fourteen-year-old heart drove me to save for a pair of pretty Italian shoes I never wore outside my bedroom. My parents had to have a camper van they logged half a night in over six years of ownership. It’s human to want stuff we not only don’t need but find more trouble than worth. What were we thinking?

It was that thought that led me to look a moment at what American labor has been for. What is it we want or wanted as a people? These days it’s hard to tell, with obscure cases like Syria represented as in our national interest. Well, at least Syria is shorter and easier to spell than Viet Nam, but I think otherwise one is like the other and we’d be better off struggling with our dopey shoe or camper purchases.

One thing Americans have labored for (some giving their lives in the process) and defend mightily is freedom, such as the above questioning of possible military involvement in Syria. I’m free to say “Idiots” or “Go for it,” “Oh NO,” “Here we go,” or “Here we go again,” not because I alone will agree with or buck the government. Freedom is something we collectively own, support, cherish, renew, and test with our differing views. Freedom is an ideal. It is to a secular society what Jerusalem or Mecca is to a believer true.

Frankly, I think strong secular society helping to guarantee our freedoms is an important barrier preventing religious excess from mashing us to pulp. The wall of separation between church and state has the important role of keeping theological wrongdoing in check, not that the state side of the wall doesn’t need constant watching for its excesses.

To big pictures such as faith or freedom, I like to bring a human story to show people coping in those big pictures, because we don’t come with instruction books covering proper exercise of either. When my family freely moved from Chicago to the North Shore, we enjoyed liberty but not much understanding of what we were in.

I’ve told the story before that at the start of school I was given a gym list that included a supporter. I was twelve, so support in that area was more of a theoretical than practical nature. Coming from a strict parochial school, I was very good at processions with tightly folded hands and head held at solemn angle.

Playing games instead of prayers and dashing around in gym shorts were new freedoms I was ill-prepared to enjoy, especially the supporter thing sold to Mom by a store keeper whom I imagine dancing with joy to have finally gotten rid of that old thing to “the new Polack lady from Chicago for her kid.

” With an adjustable elastic strap able to gird me three times over, there was a sack portion able to fit one part of another of me, but never both, and I’ve yet to mention the loops and straps I never was able to figure out (Mother’s offer to help was firmly rejected) other than by winding them around and through, which always resulted in elastic band leakage out a leg hole. Boys in gym found this most amusing and snapped my bands at every opportunity until I was a sea of red marks. None of that warmed me to gym.

In those free and glory days there was another requirement that I bring a “specimen” for analysis following a physical exam more embarrassing than any known to me previously. There I was with an official note: “Please have your son bring a specimen to the school office.” We were all too refined to ask what this meant, so Mother had me poop in a fruit jar that was then tightly lidded and supplied with the words “Specimen Belonging To” followed by my name. Imagine my pride the following day and the endless length of the school bus ride where I protected that glass jar in a brown bag.

No walk could have been longer than mine to the school office to hand over this burden. To this day I imagine the facial expressions and laughter in the office when they found my canned turd in a neatly labeled jar. I’ll tell you this much: I’d have sooner stood in underpants in downtown Grand Marais than return to that office unless thoroughly disguised.

It is, you see, ordinary human beings who receive and oftentimes don’t know what to do with or know how to act toward the gift of freedom. They may well struggle as I did with elastic bands or a turd in a jar bearing their name. Freedom doesn’t guarantee an easy time, or that those given freedom will know what to do with their gift.

As a liberal-minded person, I think it’s a fair call to ask a system or “larger” society to take a moment to consider the confusion of those told to get a “supporter” or to provide a “specimen.” Things are not always clear to others, and we can and should make some effort to accommodate the individual.

 But using “freedom” of this or that as a guise should not allow individual demands to tyrannize society or the freedoms of others. In their private lives within a secular society, people may be as devout as they wish, but in public life I don’t have to respect their arbitrary limits placed on me or mine.

If religion Y preaches that women are the chief residents of hell (there is such a scripture in a major group), that’s their right to believe, but it is also my right to oppose the spread of dogmatic sexism and to call scripture vile when it is so.