Redtree Times

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…

— Me and Bobby McGee, Kris Kristofferson

That line from Me and Bobby McGee has echoed in my head for almost 55 years. One Christmas back then, Santa left me a new cassette player/recorder. It was a cheap plastic one, a Ross if my sometime spotty memory is correct. But more importantly, he also left me a Janis Joplin tape.

It was her album, Pearl. I played the hell out of that tape for years. Songs like Cry Baby, Get It While You Can, Mercedes Benz and the others left a deep impression on my 12-year-old mind, but none more than this song and that line. 

A few years later one of my English teachers asked the class the question, “What is freedom?“

I answered, ” Just another word for nothing left to lose.” I then had to duck as one of his Clark Wallabee shoes soared past my head.

As I said, it made an impression.

Even though I didn’t have enough world experience to understand it at the time, maybe it was the fact that those words held a kernel of a universal truth that made it such a potent line.

A little over a decade later, I learned that truth for myself. I found myself bankrupted and broke, my home foreclosed on, I had just endured a mental health crisis, and I was scrambling to find some sort of job to make a few dollars for food and gas.

It felt like I was at rock bottom. It would be hard to go much deeper. The only direction to go was up.

It was a nerve-wracking time, to say the least. But, oddly enough, it was also an exhilarating time. In many ways, I never felt freer. I was only constrained by my lack of education, opportunity, and money.

But I firmly believed that these shortcomings could be overcome with a little energy, imagination, and creativity. I had a lot of energy then and enough imagination to be creative.

I might have been in a deep dark hole at that time but there was bright light coming from above.

I only had to figure out how to climb out of that hole so that I might stand in the light and grow like a plant nourished by the sun.

With nothing left to lose, I was absolutely free. I was living that line from Me and Bobby McGee.

Long story made short, I got out of that pit and into the light. 

I feel less free these days.

While I still have some imagination and creativity, I don’t have the same levels of energy or stamina as I did 30 years ago.  As a result, I worry more about things and money and how to endure old age If I make it to there. All that kind of stuff. 

I am not saying that I want to return to that earlier state of freedom but, having experienced it once before, I can better appreciate it for what it was. I now know that should push come to shove and I am somehow toppled back into that deep hole, I will still be able to figure a way out.

And, with nothing left to lose, be free once more.

Unfortunately, I fear that many more of us here in this country will find themselves with that same nothing-left-to-lose freedom in the coming years. The powerful people responsible for this should be forewarned that that a population with the freedom brought about by having nothing left to lose is an unstoppable force. 

This was not the post I meant to write today. Certainly not one so personally revealing. I was going to write about our president’s reprisal of his role as The Gimp from Pulp Fiction during his obsequious meeting with the war criminal president of Russia yesterday as well as his striving to become king of this nation. I was going to remind you to revisit the grievances our Founding Fathers laid out against King George III in the Declaration of Independence.  I think most of you will see many immediate parallels between the actions of George that they so protested to those of our wannabe king. 

We know what happened in the first case with George III when he ran up against citizens who felt they had nothing left to lose. We’ll soon find out what happens in the present time.

Here’s that song from Janis.