Independence and a Trip to the Zoo

Not the zoo or the Uprising Museum. 

As today is my first Independence Day apart from American soil, it is naturally the first time I am really, truly thinking about what we call independence.

It started yesterday with a trip to the Warsaw Uprising Museum.

Today featured a trip to the zoo.

Independence, I think, is a tricky, slippery thing if you think about it too long, or if you don't think about it enough. There is a lot of crying and carrying on today, in city centers and chat boards and whatever other platform people can find, over rights that, last time I checked, have never existed. Marriage is not state-sanctioned. Gender is not state-sanctioned. And if you demand a right from someone, it isn't your right at all. What someone else gives to you, they have the power to stop giving.

These are the truths I hold to be self evident. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not rights. Life is a gift that will one day deplete. Liberty is a disposition, an acknowledgement of truth, and it does not come from outside. The pursuit of happiness is a responsibility. By and large, and with many and sundry exceptions, these things are taken for granted by people who think that once we are born we are entitled, free from restriction, to the things that we want.

These people have not listened closely enough to The Rolling Stones, that's what I say.

My Polish host told me yesterday, as we walked through the Uprising Museum, that an old woman who had survived Auschwitz said in an interview that even in Auschwitz, there were good times. Goodness is not a finite resource. Goodness cannot be trampled or killed or burned or bombed. Warsaw is a city that was utterly destroyed after Hitler gave the order to burn it to the ground as punishment for an insurrection that had already failed. And yet, I sit comfortably, a few kilometers from the city, well-fed after a long day at the zoo. I owe this entirely to good people, who refused to abandon something they believed to be good. They were brave people, proud for all the right reasons of all the right things, but it wasn't fighting with weapons that rebuilt their city and restored their nation. The Warsaw Uprising failed in every way but one: its memory survived. No one forgot the Warsaw buried beneath its own ruins, and over time, they brought it back to life.

I went to the zoo this morning before class, which afforded a rich exercise in vocabulary with my student this afternoon. We discussed the elephants, the giraffes, the tiggers (the best mispronunciation to date), and the seals. We talked about the bear exhibit outside the zoo in Warsaw, and the otter exhibit at the zoo in Philadelphia, and the tiggers on display at the zoo in Hanover. Then after a time, she looked down at her lap, and said, "To be frankly, I don't like the zoo."

After correcting her "frankly", I asked why not.

"Because animals," she said, in her high, shaky, and yet confident voice, "are children of freedom. When I see the tigger, I am sad to see that stare. He had such a stare."

Entirely by myself, in a foreign country, with no maps or road signs in English at all, I felt strangely akin to the animals today. They are out of their habitat, and so am I, but I am free and they are not. So I thought. I was struck, at the end of the day, by two animals on display. One was a lion, who just laid down for a nap. He flicked his tail and looked right at my camera, and I knew that without the bars around his make-shift grassland, and the steep drop between his perch and mine, neither of us would have any mistake about which one was on top. The other was a seal. There were three seals, two fat, lazy, and laying in the sun in shallow pools. The other, I think, was maybe a she, and she swam around in circles, diving down, diving up, flipping over, swimming around. She did this maybe four or five times, not hastily, but not lethargically, either. She moved at the pace of something perfectly at ease, and if not for the giggling Polish children, I think we might have heard her whistling, so contended she seemed. After her final lap she saddled up on a rock and flipped onto her back, letting her plump little seal belly soak up the sun.


What struck me was this: the lion did not seem happy, but he did seem to know exactly who he was. That seal didn't seem to know exactly where she was, but she knew exactly what she was doing, and she didn't mind at all.

Liberty can look like that lion, and liberty can look like that seal. Liberty is acknowledged, not given, and is true in all conditions, and so is happiness, at that.