Patterns vs. Randomness

by William H. Benson

May 17, 2018

Frederick Douglass was born in Maryland in 1818. Although born into slavery, Douglass was fortunate enough to escape to the north as a young man, and there he became an ardent abolitionist.

Douglass said, “The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”

Also, born in 1818, on May 5th, was Karl Marx, the German political writer and thinker. A writer for The Economist said, “Marx was a latter day prophet. The fall from grace is embodied in capitalism; man is redeemed as the proletariat rises up against its exploiters and creates a communist utopia.”

In 1816, a few English writers enjoyed a summer’s vacation at Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The poet Lord Byron suggested that they compete to see who can write the best ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s girlfriend, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then just eighteen-years-old, dreamed of a scientist who built an eight-foot-tall creature, and then galvanized the spark of life into the being. 

“From vaults and charnel-houses he exhumed dead bodies,” Mary Shelley wrote. The scientist, Victor Frankenstein regretted his experiment. He said, “I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life.” Mary Shelley published her ghost story, Frankenstein, on January 1, 1818, 200 years ago.

Three random events: the birth of an African-American slave boy in Maryland, the birth of a Jewish boy in Germany, and the publication of the world’s first horror story. Few at the time considered those three events important, and yet we acknowledge them now.

An interesting thought. What is happening now, or who is being born now, in 2018, that people in the year 2038, 200 years, or eight generations, into the future, will look back on as noteworthy? A difficult question, because human beings see far better into the past than into the future.

Space exploration is the wonder of the age. For example, on Saturday, May 5, at 5:05 a.m. Pacific time, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, NASA’s team launched a rocket towards Mars. It should land on Mars’s surface on November 26, 2018, after six months and twenty-one days of travel across 300 million miles of space. America’s achievements in space astonishes the rest of the world. 

The discovery of life, even intelligent life, on other planets though, may occur sooner than we want. Like Victor Frankenstein, we may regret that possible discovery, depending upon the degree of intelligence and of technical sophistication that we may find elsewhere in the universe.

An interesting podcast I heard last week on Invisibilia asks a set of intriguing questions, “Are we destined to repeat our patterns, or do we stray in surprising directions? Is the course of our lives a predictable pattern, or is it random?”

The podcast introduces Shon Hopwood, who in March appeared on 60 Minutes. Shon grew up in David City, Nebraska. After dropping out of college, “after about ten minutes,” he returned home, shoveled manure in a feedlot, drank plenty of beer, and then robbed five small banks in Nebraska.

Authorities caught him at the Doubletree in Omaha, and the judge sentenced him to twelve years. He arrived at the Federal penitentiary, in Pekin, Illinois, in May of 1999, and there he lifted iron, ran miles on the track, played hours of basketball, and worked in the law library.

A casual observer would say that Shon’s life would continue to disappoint his parents and siblings, that he would achieve very little stuck in prison, and that his life pattern was well-established. Pekin released him in April of 2009.

In June, Shon will turn forty-three. He is now married with two children. He received his college degree from Bellevue University in Nebraska, and his law degree at the University of Washington. Today, Shon teaches criminal law at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. 

How did he transform his life? He began to read the law books in Pekin’s law library. He came to love the law, and saw that, “the law was a big puzzle.” He wrote appeals for other prisoners, and two of them the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear, an incredible stroke of unmerited luck. 

To Steve Kroft, on 60 Minutes, Shon said, “my life doesn’t make sense to me, and I lived it,” and he credits, “the people who went out of their way to make grace for me, and that made the difference.”

Steve Jobs spoke at Stanford College’s commencement exercises on June 12, 2005, and he said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” 

I wish my best to the high school and college graduates this year. I say, work to connect the dots one at a time, and create a life pattern that will astonish your parents and friends. Yield not to the temptation to swallow the delusions of racism, communist utopias, fabulous ghost stories, or robbing banks. 

James Comey and the F.B.I.

By William H. Benson

May 3, 2018

Two weeks ago, I finished reading Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I., first published a year ago, in April 2017. David Grann, the author, tells a fascinating account of the reign of terror that the Osage Indians of central Oklahoma endured in the early 1920’s. 

Wildcat drillers had discovered a reservoir of oil that lay underneath the Osage Indians’ reservation. Hefty royalty checks transformed these destitute Native Americans into “the richest people per capita in the world.” They built mansions, purchased automobiles, and hired servants and chauffeurs. 

Then, one by one, certain Osage Indians began to die, or rather someone began to kill them off. Some were slowly poisoned. Some were shot. A bomb at night killed a husband and wife. Then, by ruse and artifice, the deceased’s claims to the oil passed on to others, some to non-Native Americans.

After more than twenty Osage Indians were killed, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I., dispatched a former Texas Ranger, Agent Tom White, to Osage County to investigate and unravel the mystery. White assembled a team of undercover agents who infiltrated the county and discovered a sinister conspiracy of white people, who were killing the Osage Indians, in order to grab their oil rights.

Grann tells a fascinating story, all true, and in it he shows how White and his undercover agents brought into play more modern techniques of investigation to ferret out the truth. 

Fifty plus years ago, when in grade school, I read Quentin Reynold’s book, The F.B.I., first published in 1954. Some of its stories still stick in my memory. He tells of gangsters and bank robbers, including Ma Barker and John Dillinger, and of Russian spies, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

1. Edgar Hoover wrote the book’s “Forward,” and in it Hoover says, “When a young man files an application with the F.B.I., we do not ask if he is the smartest boy in the class. We want to know if he is truthful, dependable, and if he played the game fair. We want to know if he respects his parents, reveres God, honors his flag, and loves his country.”

Last week, I began to read James Comey’s recent book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. The former F.B.I. Director lost his job a year ago, on May 9, 2017, when Donald Trump fired him. In the year since then, Comey has written a book, more of a memoir, than a “tell-all” exposé. He devotes only an estimated 20% of his book to his interactions with the president.

In the rest of the book, Comey tells of his early years in college at William and Mary, in law school at Chicago, and of prosecuting criminals in U. S. Attorney’s offices. He describes wrangling with the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, the gangsters, and the terrorists. He rehashes his prosecution of Martha Stewart, his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, and he stands by his decisions. 

A smart thing that Comey did was draft memos, after he met or spoke with the president. One memo lists details of Comey’s meeting with President Trump on January 27, 2017, seven days after the inauguration. Alone, the two men shared a meal at a small table in the White House’s Green Room. 

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on 20/20, on Sunday, April 15, 2018, Comey described their conversation. Trump said, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.” Comey said nothing. “We simply looked at each other in silence. I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression.”

At the end of the meal, Trump repeated his words, “I need loyalty.” This time Comey said, “You will always get honesty from me.” Trump said, “That’s what I want, honest loyalty.” Comey said, “You will get that from me.”

Comey’s account demonstrates the distinction between a glib politician, and a stubborn law enforcement agent. The former says whatever he or she wants to say, but the latter is careful to stay within the borders of truth. The former is looking for followers who obey his or her wishes, but the latter avoids following anyone or anything, except the closest path to the truth.

Two and a half millennium ago, in ancient Greece, Socrates thought as deeply on the issues of truth and lies, knowledge and ignorance, and ethics and immoral actions, as anyone has. Up to the day the authorities ordered him to drink the hemlock and die, he maintained that a frank, honest, and public discussion of life’s great issues is necessary for a person to feel truly successful.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Near his book’s beginning, James Comey admits that on occasion he can be “stubborn and prideful,” as I suspect most F.B.I. agents are, but anyone who reads his words or hears him speak will detect his commitment to a higher loyalty: to the truth, to the rule of law, and to the U. S. Constitution. 

Mark Twain in Syria

by William H. Benson

April 19, 2018

In the year 1867, the thirty-one year old Mark Twain joined several dozen other Americans on a pleasure cruise across the Atlantic to see the sights around the Mediterranean Sea. When in Syria, Twain and his friends hired a guide and rode horses from the coast inland, towards Damascus, then south to the Sea of Galilee, and finally alongside the Jordan River to Jerusalem.

In his book, The Innocents Abroad, Twain reveals his disgust with Syria and Palestine. The worst of the worst though, for him, was the village of Magdala, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. 

He writes, “Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy. The streets of Magdala are reeking with uncleanliness.” 

“As we rode into Magdala not a soul was visible. But the ring of the horses’ hoofs roused the population, and they all came trooping out—old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the crippled, all in ragged, soiled, and scanty raiment, and all abject beggars by nature, instinct, and education.”

In a deafening chorus, they shout, “Howajji, baksheesh!,” a cry for money, and Twain and the others paid “baksheesh out to sore-eyed children, and to girls with tattooed lips and chins.”

A reader of Twain’s words may wonder, “Why are these people so pitiful, reduced to begging?”

Twain hints at an answer. “If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. The Syrians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by a system of taxation that would drive any other nation frantic.”

In 2012, the popular science writer Jared Diamond asked a similar question in his book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. In it, he points to the differences between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico, a single city that the U.S. / Mexico border cuts in two.

Diamond writes, “The reason that Nogales, Arizona, is much richer than Nogales, Sonora, is simple. It is because of the very different institutions on the two sides of the border.” 

On the Arizona side, he says, “good economic institutions motivate people to become productive. They protect private property rights, enforce contracts, provide opportunities to retain control of their money, control inflation, and allow an open exchange of currency.

“If those institutions are missing, people are unlikely to work hard. They know that their earnings or profits are likely to be confiscated.”

A more perceptive question, “Why do people stay in wretched conditions, like in 1867 Magdala?”

The answer is not simple. It comes down to human motivation. It is difficult to move alone, to leave the familiar for the unknown. After all, family and familiar are the same word. 

The Chinese say, “If you want to go quickly, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.” It is easier to leave behind depravity and wretchedness, if an entire family, clan, or tribe moves together.

And yet each fall, freshman college students pack their bags and head off to college alone, and they go quickly. For the boys and girls in 1867 Magdala though, college was not an option.

The U.S. federal government, through HUD, has funded a program, “Moving to Opportunity.” “Poor families receive housing vouchers that require them to move to better areas. The vouchers go to only a quarter of those who qualify. Waiting lists are sometimes a decade-long.”

But, “the benefits, in social-science terms, are astonishing. Children who moved before the age of 13 went on to have incomes 31% higher than those who remained.” The fog bank of depravity and short-sighted thinking lifts, and people for the first time begin to see opportunities.

Some insist that a young person should build a life where they are. Russell Conway’s Acres of Diamonds comes to mind. Then, there are government programs that invite entire families to leave and start over in a different neighborhood with different schools and jobs. Do we stay? Do we leave?

World Vision estimates that more than 5.6 million Syrians have fled their country, since the civil war there began in March 2011. Over 6 million are considered as “displaced persons” within Syria, and 13.1 million need humanitarian assistance. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives.

President Bahar al-Assad has rained down on the rebels, from helicopters, an estimated 70,000 barrel bombs loaded with chemical agents, the most recent on Douma, earlier this month.

Millions have left, leaving behind homes and possessions, choosing the strange and unknown, over the dangerous and the familiar. Millions have stayed at home and suffered unspeakable atrocities.

Should they leave? Should they stay? Each must decide. 

Assassinations in the 1960’s

by William H. Benson

April 5, 2018

In January 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald—a former U.S. Marine, twenty-four years old, and living in Dallas, Texas—purchased through the mail a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver. In March that same year, he purchased a secondhand 6.5mm caliber Carcano rifle for $29.95. 

On the evening of April 10, 1963, Oswald approached the home of retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker, who sat at his desk near a window, in his Dallas, Texas home. From a hundred feet away, Oswald fired the Carcano rifle, but the bullet stuck the window frame.

Oswald escaped the scene, and police officials failed to connect him to the shooting. At home, he admitted to Marina—whom he had met and married in the Soviet Union—that he had shot at Walker.

In the autumn of 1963, President John F. Kennedy authorized American support for a military coup that would gain control of South Vietnam’s republican government. According to the historian Paul Johnson, “the CIA provided $42,000 in bribes for officers to set up a military junta.” 

On November 1, 1963, the military officers seized Ngo Dien Diem, then president of South Vietnam, and the following day, they assassinated him, and his brother. Lyndon Johnson said, “the worst mistake we ever made.” From then on, South Vietnam’s government lacked sufficient strength to withstand Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnam’s repeated attacks.

Three weeks after the coup in Vietnam, the U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, was murdered.

On Friday, November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald waited in a corner room, hidden behind some boxes, on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked. At 12:30 p.m., as the President’s motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, Oswald fired his rifle four times. 

One bullet passed through the President’s neck and struck Texas Governor John Connelly. Another struck the back of the President’s head. At Parkland Hospital, at 1:00 p.m., doctors pronounced Kennedy dead. He left behind his wife Jackie, his daughter Caroline, and his son John.

Oswald fled the Depository, took a bus to his rooming house, changed clothes, and walked away on foot. A Dallas police officer named J. D. Tippit drove up next to Oswald, and the two men exchanged words. At 1:15 p.m., Tippit stepped out of his car and approached Oswald, who then aimed his revolver and shot Tippit four times. Tippit left behind his wife Marie, two sons, and a daughter.

Oswald snuck into a movie theater and sat near the back. Dallas policeman Nick McDonald arrived and approached Oswald, who withdrew his revolver, aimed it at McDonald, and pulled the trigger. It failed to fire though, because as McDonald grabbed for the weapon, the hammer struck the webbing between Oswald’s thumb and index fingers. McDonald hustled Oswald out of the theater.

On Sunday, November 24, at 11:21 a.m., Dallas police officers were transferring Oswald from city jail to county jail, when Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, distraught over Kennedy’s death, stepped forward, and shot Oswald in the stomach. At Parkland Hospital, at 1:07 p.m., doctors pronounced Lee Harvey Oswald dead. He left behind his wife Marina, and their two young daughters, June and Rachel.

Fifty years ago this week, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King, Jr. He left behind his wife Coretta Scott King, two sons, and two daughters. 

Two months later, on June 5, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan, a twenty-four year old Palestinian of Jerusalem, shot Robert Kennedy, who had just won the California primary, as he walked through the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen. Robert Kennedy left behind his wife Ethel and their eleven children. 

Thirty years later, on April 23, 1998, James Earl Ray died in prison of liver disease. Sirhan Sirhan though still resides in Federal prison. Fifteen times he has appealed for parole, and fifteen times officials have denied his request. He turned seventy-four last month. Fifty years in prison.

This series of assassinations were touchstones of the 1960’s, symptomatic of the deep disaffections that separated people then and now: between America and Russia, between West and East, between the Communist and free worlds, between Palestinians and Israelis, and between white and black people. From these touchstones, one can trace the continual tragic events that have unfolded since.

Or as Marc Antony says in William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” The unleashed dogs of war of the 1960’s have hounded the world for fifty plus years. 

But how does a person begin to understand Lee Harvey Oswald? 

The Warren Commission said that he acted alone, that, “he was moved by an overriding hostility to his environment, unable to establish relationships with other people, committed to Marxism, and able to act decisively and without regard to the consequences when such action would further his aims of the moment. These factors molded his character, into a man capable of assassinating the President.”

Stephen Hawking and Billy Graham

by William H. Benson

March 22, 2018

A preacher and a scientist passed away weeks ago: Billy Graham on February 21, and Stephen Hawking on March 14. One lived in the USA, and the other in the UK. One promoted religion, the other physics. Billy was 99, and Hawking was 76.

Both men achieved unparalleled success, even celebrity status, despite their frailties.

Billy Graham suffered poor health for much of his life. When first married, he came down with the mumps. His biographer said he endured “hernias, ulcers, tumors, cysts, polyps, infections, pneumonia, high blood pressure, headaches, spider bites, and a series of falls that broke eighteen of his ribs,” plus a broken pelvis and hip, and also excess fluid on his brain that required a shunt.

In 2014, his son Franklin said, “He’s hard of hearing, can’t see very well, but his mind his clear.”

None of Graham’s suffering though can compare to Stephen Hawking’s. In 1963, when 21, and studying at Oxford, Hawking’s voice slurred, and he fell down often. Doctors diagnosed Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. They gave him two years to live, but later, doctors decided that his was an early-onset but slow-progressing type of ALS, and that he would live.

Over time, Hawking lost his voice, was forced into a wheelchair, and prior to his passing, caregivers fed him and lifted him in and out of his bed and wheelchair.

Billy Graham preached more than 400 crusades, in tents, stadiums and parking lots, around the globe from 1947 until 2005, when he retired. His lifetime audiences topped 2.2 billion. People everywhere recognized his distinct North Carolina trumpet-like voice. “He preached the Christian faith to more people in person than anyone ever or since in all of Christianity.” 

Billy wrote 33 books, all of a religious nature, and the royalties he received he gifted to his children and grandchildren’s educations.

Hawking was the 17th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position he held for thirty years, until he retired in 2009. He wrote academic papers, plus books on mathematics and black holes.

In 1982, Hawking wrote a popular, easy-to-read book on the universe. Motivated by his need to finance his children’s education, his A Brief History of Time was first published in April of 1988. It sold over 9 million copies.

Billy married once. Ruth Graham said she had the better job. She watched their five children grow up, at their home at Montreat, North Carolina, near Asheville, while Billy traveled the world.

Ruth joked that when Billy gets to heaven, he will ask for a key to his hotel room.

A historian of religion, Grant Wacker, said, “People who didn’t like Billy Graham spent a lot of time trying to find personal violations of his moral and ethical code, and they couldn’t. They didn’t exist. He was a man who maintained absolute marital fidelity and moral and financial integrity. He was an evangelist who lived the way he preached.”

Hawking married twice. In 1995, after thirty years of marriage and three kids, he divorced his first wife, Jane, who felt overwhelmed. Her husband’s need for nurses and therapists, and his celebrity status intruded into their family life. Also, her strong Christian faith contrasted with his avowed atheism.

After the divorce, that same year he married one of his nurses, Ellen Mason, but that marriage also ended in divorce, eleven years later in 2006.

Because Billy was absolutely convinced of his message, that faith in Christ is essential, he convinced millions of others. In an interview with Brian Williams, Billy said, “The mystery of death. I think there’s a mystery to it. And I’m looking forward with great anticipation to going to heaven.”

Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

Yet, Hawking did write, in A Brief History of Time, “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we should know the mind of God.”

One interesting note. The Queen approached Stephen Hawking about a knighthood in the 1990’s, but he refused, in protest to scarce government funding for science.

Later, the Queen approached Billy Graham, and he accepted. In a ceremony performed at the British Embassy, in Washington D.C., on December 6, 2001, Sir Christopher Meyer, the British Ambassador, on behalf of the Queen, made Billy Graham an Honorary Knight.

Two celebrities. One a believer in Christianity, the other a believer in science. One wrote books on angels and Peace with God. The other wrote on space and time and how they related. One accepted the Queen’s Knighthood, the other refused. Both suffered poor health. May they now rest in peace. 

Tara Westover’s Educated

by William H. Benson

March 8, 2018

I just finished listening to Tara Westover’s riveting memoir, Educated, an account of her years growing up as the youngest of seven children, in a fundamentalist Mormon family in southeastern Idaho, at the base of a mountain, Buck Peak. 

Tara’s dad, Gene, (a pseudonym) ran a junkyard, and her mother earned money as a midwife, but she also concocted a variety of herbs, oils, and tinctures, potions that she believed healed all ailments.

Dad feared the federal government. He buried gasoline tanks, guns, and ammunition in holes that he dug around his house. He told Tara, “When the feds come to Buck Peak, we’ll be ready.” 

Dad feared hospitals and doctors. “You’re worse off going to the hospital,” he would say. As a result, Tara did not receive a birth certificate until years later, but no one remembered her birth date.

In the home, there was no television, no telephone, no pain relievers, and no vaccinations. 

Dad feared the school system. He pulled Tara’s older brothers out of the public school when they were in grade school. He said, “school was a ploy to lead children away from God.” Mom home-schooled the boys for a time, but Dad needed their help in the junkyard. 

By the time Tara came along, mom had dropped all pretense at home-schooling, and as a result, Tara never received any education. No lessons, no math, no essays, no homework, and no tests. There were books: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and sermons by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Tara wrote, “I understand that it was this fact, more than any other, that made my family different. We didn’t go to school.” 

Instead, she worked in the junkyard. For the children, it was dangerous work: amputated fingers, gashes in arms, and horrific burns. There was a car-crusher, and a set of shears that cut angle iron but sent it flying at heads and arms. Then, Dad would throw things. He threw a steel cylinder once that caught Tara in the stomach. Another time, he almost ran her through the car-crusher.

Later, Dad started to build milk-barns and haying sheds for neighbors, and Tara’s job was to crawl around on the roof thirty feet high, and drill screws into corrugated metal sheeting, in the wind.

The worst though was the abuse she endured from her older brother Shawn (another pseudonym). When riled, Shawn would twist Tara’s wrist back, or he would grab her by the hair and slam her face first into the toilet. This happened again and again, and her parents chose not to see their son’s abusive acts directed at their youngest daughter, despite a broken toe, and a snapped wrist.

Tara wrote, “My family had violence in it, especially violence against women. We did not confront the patriarch, the father. It would have been inappropriate for me to challenge his authority.” She also said, “In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth.”

When seventeen, Tara was adamant; she would attend college at Brigham Young University, even though her dad warned her, “You are whoring after men’s knowledge and not God’s.”

At BYU, her ignorance was profound. She knew so little of anything. During a lecture she raised her hand and said, “What is the Holocaust?” She knew nothing of slavery, the Civil War, of Martin Luther King, and the civil rights movement. Yet, she was bright, intelligent, and she knew how to work. 

Her roommates had to help her find clothes other than the men’s jeans and work shirts she always wore, and they had to give her lessons on washing her hands after using the bathroom, and on washing dishes, rather than letting them stack up in the sink for later. 

Tara did well at BYU, and earned a semester at Cambridge, in England, but her dad threatened not to attend her college graduation, unless she admit that her success was due to her home-schooling.

Tara won a Gates Scholarship to study at Cambridge, and also a fellowship at Harvard. She has since completed a Ph.D. in intellectual history at Cambridge University, where now at the age of 31, she lives and works. Hers is a Horatio Alger story, a remarkable story, most astonishing. 

Of all the memoirs I have read, including Angela’s Ashes, Glass Castles, and Hillbilly Elegy, I think this memoir exceeds them all, in terms of the terror and powerlessness that she must have felt when a young girl. I wonder if any producer would dare to make this book into a movie. It was so painful to listen to the book, that I dare not imagine what it would feel like to watch it on the screen also.

Tara recently said that she identifies with the lyrics to a Bob Marley song, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. No one but ourselves can free our minds.”