“Son, America is the enemy of humanity and it is your sacred duty to destroy her!” By my side at a rally, my father watched with a look of approval at my commitment as I retrieved my red flag from a ditch. “Wave that flag, boy!” he yelled. You see, my father was a founding member of the Communist Party of Puerto Rico. He left an extensive FBI file that I brought with me. I remember the FBI always following and I hated them. Eventually, I joined the party with him to burn America to the ground.
On the other hand, my humble mother was whatever my father said we were but she would quietly sneak me to go to church with friends. A double consciousness soon developed in me, one I tried to merge by one day joining the Jesuit Order. I was hoping to go to Nicaragua to study liberation theology. The death of seven Jesuits in El Salvador prevented that journey and I left seminary.
I then decided to come to America and landed at the University of Southern Mississippi of all places! Right there in the Deep South, my lungs were filled with the air of freedom. For the first time in my life, the lived experience of freedom shattered my once safe assumptions. America showed me that the individual matters and that I am not simply a drop in the Great Sea of Revolution. I learned the importance of a connection between reward and accomplishment that makes people flourish.
The Freedom & Virtue Institute is a response to the need of preserving that connection. We offer simple, practical, meaningful, and replicable projects focusing on the lived experience of freedom, an experience that helps young people internalize the idea of liberty as a value. This idea will eventually flourish as a life dedicated to work, risk-taking, and enterprise. After all, it is freedom as an internalized value the one that sustains us when failure comes.
We have intellectualized freedom so much that it has become a curiosity, a talking point. The poor hear that word as if it were from a foreign language spoken by “them.”
After over twenty years of inner-city work, we formed the institute as the flowering of that experience of service. Through a growing network of volunteers and organizations, we are impacting the lives of people by creating networks of influence for freedom in communities often infected with the virus of dependency. A good example of what we do are the Self-Reliance Clubs. We go to schools and change the meaning of existing activities to make them entrepreneurial. Students work and earn money. With these earnings they meet their educational needs and even add to a small future college or trade-school fund. Small enterprises are being formed at some schools. Our volunteers teach students economics and the club follows students from elementary school to high school. We call the clubs a “model project” that shows in practice what we teach through our “Effective Compassion Training.”
Our work is built on the idea that undirected, natural processes focused on incentives toward economic initiative work better than structured and complicated systems. This concept is true to this motto:“From relief to development; from dependency to liberty.” It is time to show that a society that cares both for freedom and for the poor can be built by people coming together and experiencing what freedom is. It can be done with a great respect for human dignity and the belief that the poor are not scenery in the drama of our good intentions but protagonists of the story of their own lives.
Twelve years ago, I buried my father with his beloved red flag embracing his casket. He died a communist. At that time, I again silently sang the revolutionary songs and paid homage to the fallen warrior. Absolute coalescence between his politics and my new vision was never achieved, but I know that God likes fighters on his side. I have no doubt that in the heavenly abode, the full truth now discovered; he is still gathering the angels around to do more than just singing. “I do not agree, Ismael,” he told me near the end. “But do not become a fence-sitter.”
And now, I am convinced, he still looks on in contented approval.
Ismael Hernandez, Executive Director & Founder
