Have we forsaken the liberty for which we paid so dearly?
The United States has been an experiment in liberty, the light of freedom for the world. As is true of all experiments, it is far from perfect. We battled internally. We have resisted each wave of immigrants from the Irish to the Chinese to Eastern Europe and now the Middle East and Latin America. We rejected the Jews of Hitler’s Europe to the horrors of the Holocaust. We are stained with the legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow; and the near genocide of the American Indian. Lincoln addressed the inadequacies of denying from to others. “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves”
There is nowhere in the world that is without flaw – and often great cruelty. The opportunity to reach one’s potential is greater here than anywhere else in the world. The United States is the great experiment of liberty. Where there has been injustice, we have found disobedience. “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” Henry David Thoreau
We fought wars and experienced the failures of trial and error in protecting our liberty and extending that liberty to others as equals. We persevered.
What has happened to us as a people? Liberty – the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views. The true test of liberty is the tolerance to let others whose way of life, behavior, or political views is different from yours. That tolerance is waning.
The founders of our country literally put their lives on the line for liberty and today there are those who would cede that liberty for security or to maintain the status quo. Benjamin Franklin said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The Constitution does not guarantee one’s right not to have one’s feeling hurt or people may disagree. We cannot embrace authoritarianism, nor can we accept the intolerance of omitting anyone or anything that is not perfect. Both are the antithesis of free thought.
It is time to reaffirm our liberty.
