Water From Wawas

I've been thinking alot about liberty since arriving in Philadelphia. 

For those of you who don't know Philadelphia will be taking Botson outside to contest who is the real birthplace of American democracy. Now Philadelphia is better known for being a somewhat run down port city as described in Rocky¹ and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air².

"Really?" Was the response from the lady at passport control when I told her with a straight face that I was in Philly to backpack. She seemed so sceptical that I began to worry that she'd begin to question my shiny, new, blue American passport with a picture so awful in it no spy would allow it to be used. But she seemed mollified when I mentioned I would be moving on to DC in a few days time and I escaped with no further questioning of my holiday destinations. 

The historic centre of Philadelphia is a beautiful part of the city. It's got a lovely mix of Art Deco architecture from the city's hey days during the 1920s and original redbrick Colonial buildings from the city's foundation in the 1600/1700s. 

Highly walkable having been built when horse power was still ment literally my hostel was located bang in the middle of "Independence National Park" (Look the city tourism board know they've got something here and they are ready to flog that dead horse into a paste). 

I took full advantage of the National Park Service's free app which has several free walking tours with mini audio guides to give some context of the buildings around you. Maybe it's because I'm used to London or my early exposure to the American West but I like the simplicity of the Colonial style buildings in America. I like the simplicity of the historic buildings, it's easy to stumbled across them as you wander around. On my way to catch the the train this morning I did a double take when I noticed that I was standing at a stop light opposite Declaration House where the Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." (Jefferson, 1776) What is often left in the footnotes is that Jefferson had help from his enslaved manservant, who was also his brother in law. 

I was amazed and very pleased by how open the museums were about the fact that so many of the promises made in Philadelphia had some pretty massive caveats to them. Its not something I've seen in the UK even though Britain was just as involved with the slave trade as the many of the Framers themselves were³.

Many of the Framers were slave owners as much as they were men of the Enlightenment. George Washington rotated his slaves back to his Virginian plantations so that they would not gain their freedom under Pennsylvania free slave laws (Smithsonian, 2015). This was something I learned at the President's House site in Independence Park. 

It does raise the question if you're not familiar with the Declaration of Independence or Constitutional what legal nonsense was concocted to base the blatantly racist views on. The answer to that was the 3/5th compromise. Essentially it was an agreement in the constitution that enslaved people would be counted as 3/5th of a freed person for tax and census purposes⁴. That's more than just a little asterisk to the phrase "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" (Jefferson, 1776). What exactly is 66% of the right to life or clean water mean? Must you're every third mouthful of water be unclean? Habeas corpus only applies to to 3/5ths of their body? So their left arm and leg can be jailed without due process but the rest requires a warrant from a judge? 

Now obviously these questions are silly but they're ment to be. And they were never answered when (spoilers) slavery was abolished and African Americans, and other people of color, were granted citizenship in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

The idea that in a relatively plain room open to the public you could have a peaceful transfer of power that is not based on bloodlines⁶. And next door the idea that a bicameral legislature with some level of direct representation. These might seem like obvious things but they were and remain revolutionary. Most revolutions fail because leaders do not step down and become despots or systems of government are structured so that a significant minority is persistently overlooked leading to discontent and eventually unrest. 

One need only look that th Good Friday Peace Agreement and the gridlock in Stromount for most of the last 3 years to see how difficult it can be to develop a system of government where all sides feel like they're getting a voice.

You will never hear me argue that the American system of government is perfect but what I will often argue is that it is revolutionary in a way that I think is often forgotten because it has become normal. And so I go back to liberty. 

About the time I touched down in Philadelphia there was a chemical spill upstream from Philadelphia on the Delawre River (CNN, 2023). Which meant I was greeted at my hostel with this sign on the door and people slightly manically buying armfulls of bottled water from Wawa's. 

Merriam Webster defines liberty  as "the quality or state of being free" or "the power to do as one pleases". 

However this is not the only theoretical approach to liberty. My preference is the positive/negative liberties concept. Broadly this means that negative liberties mean you are not stopped from doing something whereas positive liberty systems are more focused on the possibility of what could be done. As a rule of thumb negative liberties increase liberty for the individual whereas positive liberties increases liberty for the group as a whole (Stanford, 2021).

You could make the argument that the first definition Merriam Webster gives is for negative liberty and the second is positive, but at that point we're arguing semantics and I'm going to stop.  

But each morning and afternoon the little sign would be updated, the city would send a text to all people assuring us the tap water was safe to drink, and the Mayor assuredus that hebreally liked the tasted of latex compounds in the water (ok i made that last one up). But I would look at the homeless people on the street and those panic buying bottled water and wonder. Here they lived in the birthplace of representative democracy but I wonder how liberated they felt having to spend $10 a gallon on drinking water⁷. 

Yes, the constitution is a radical document. It is one of the first to extend negative liberties to millions, but what of positive liberties? *I* am free to buy out an entire Wawa's supply of bottled water but I'm free to trust that the municipal government will regulate the water company appropriately to keep the water supply safe.