ABSTRACT FREEDOM, Creating Emotional Integrity in Relationships

Abstract Freedom is a powerful and persuasive book with regard to its ability to make a vital connection between our collective past as a society and our personal ethnic and cultural histories. Abstract Freedom assists the reader in understanding how American society is able to make amazing technological and economical advancements, yet is unable to establish the same competence in advancing human relationships. The author, Lorenzo D. Leonard, brings to the forefront a critical element formerly missing from our history lessons. What we are teaching our children with regards to the history of their culture serves to perpetuate the violence, dominance and hatred we currently witness being acted out with a disturbing frequency. This book offers a clear analysis of how the distorted truth with reference to our collective past, as a society, impacts the core of an individual's personal life, expecially primary relationships. The author quotes Mark Twain: "It is not what you don't know that will hurt you. It is what you think you know that aint' so." Mr. Leonard continues: As a society, we continue to perpetuate a way of life that is based on emotional, psychological, spiritual, sexual, physical, economical, legal and political dominationn of either self or another. To help reinforce this way of life we have constructed religious mores and political ideologies that support the practice of domination; a fact that can be evidenced by our ever-increasing need to seek power and control through condemnation ofo either self or another. We have become a society thoroughly addicted to dominating self and another, as well as to being dominated ourselves in return. We know of the "other", but we know very little about "one another." We need not continue to be afraid of "what we don't know", and that is precisely the very painful yet rich history that each individual represents, both individually as well as culturally. What will contune to hurt us, both individually and as a society, is the reluctance to let go of "what ain't so", which is the belief that power, control and indignity takes precendence over emotional integrity, equality, respect, and dignity....So Let It Be Different Tomorrow.