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The hand-painted letters on the side of a van seemed to scream like an outraged shout. I was just east of Birmingham Monday afternoon — heading east on I-20 — when I saw the words.

“I AM A HUMAN BEING.”

That’s all it said. There appeared to be a young white man driving. The van had out-of-state license plates. There was no other clue about what the words meant. But, somehow, it made sense to me. I like to imagine that I know how the man inside felt.

A human being is naturally free. He doesn’t live with shackles on his hands and feet, but he also doesn’t allow shackles on his mind. He doesn’t live in a cage with bars and a lock on the outside. But neither does he allow his mind to be caged and controlled.

We don’t enslave people’s bodies anymore. The chains and shackles are mostly in museums. But we’ve done something far worse. We’ve given up control of our minds. We’ve turned over control to bullies and politicians and advertisers and carnival barkers.

And even though our bodies wander the world freely, this control of our minds leaves us doing and saying and being what someone else wants us to be. But every now and then, one of us wakes up to the reality of the culture we’ve created. And even before we fully understand what’s going on, something inside cries out.

I am a human being! I have a right to be free!

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I hate weddings, so I’m not sure why I agreed to go to one Saturday afternoon. But Kristen had invited me to go with her to several events in recent months and I’d declined them all. On a whim, I accepted this invitation, even though I wouldn’t know a soul there except my date.

The small country church was overflowing with a couple hundred people. I’d never been to this small rural community. I felt like an anthropologist trying to quietly disappear into the crowd of a tribe he was studying. But were they the aliens? Or was that me?

While we were on the way to the church, Kristen told me the couple’s story. The bride has never been married but has a 5-year-old daughter. The groom is the only son in a family that owns a couple of auto parts stores. The bride claims the pair had been dating “off and on” for awhile. The groom says it was just casual sex every now and then, but she got pregnant.

Angry parents were soon involved. The groom’s family insisted on an abortion. The bride’s family demanded a wedding. There were threats made all around. And now a semi-fancy wedding had been thrown together in just weeks.

I knew all of that going in — and Kristen told me everybody knew — but what I was about to see was a theatrical performance that defied all reality.

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I had just left work Friday afternoon when I noticed clouds gathering to the west. The sun was about 20 minutes from sinking beneath the horizon, so I thought there might be a good sunset. I made a detour to the top of Shades Mountain and found a perfect spot from which to watch a glorious sunset.

Afterwards, I went straight to dinner. I looked through my photos and picked the one I liked best. As I sat there looking at a full-screen copy of the shot, I wanted to share it with someone. It wasn’t out of pride about my work. The desire came from excitement about the beauty of what I’d just experienced.

And there was nobody who I wanted to share with. That made me feel very much alone.

In that moment, I realized in a painful way how much I miss having a partner with whom to share the routine details of daily life. I miss having someone who wants to hear what happened in my day — and I miss listening to the mundane thoughts and experiences of a woman I love.

If you don’t love someone, listening to such things is a chore. If you do love someone, it’s a privilege.

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