The first two lines of James Lowell’s (1819-1891) epic 1845 poem, “The Present Crisis”, remind us that: “When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast, Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west.”
Various people throughout the world may have a different perception of “freedom” -- i.e. what it means to them--how they define it. The Oxford Dictionary lists what I consider to be pertinent definitions:
- The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants;
- The absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government;
- The power of self-determination attributed to the will; the quality of being independent of fate or necessity.
Americans have generally subscribed to one or more of these definitions over time. However, there is another meaning of “freedom” which is often overlooked. I was guilty of that until I found it several years ago in The Urban Dictionary, by a writer using the cyber name of ‘Tarkan Atilla’. I’ll paraphrase his thoughts from 2010: “Freedom (which includes the element of ‘self-control’) entails the concept of having the ability to do what one OUGHT to do. It’s not the same as license, which implies one’s ability to do whatever one WANTS to do. If we assume that the concept of freedom is (or should be) universal, then it can’t be what any of us merely want it to be!
“As an example: If you want to raise my taxes to increase your freedom, that would detract from my freedom. Since freedom is the ability to do what one ought to do, then that truly is freedom, because when one does what he ought to do, rather than what he wants to do, he infringes on no one else’s freedom. Therefore, by this definition, the only person who can limit one’s freedom in a society where freedom entails doing what he ought to do, is that person himself.”
All of which is a prelude to an eternal truth that has been carved into the stone of our historic American “mind” – the truth that there is now, always has been, and always will be, a high price that must be paid in order to preserve our individual liberties and our patrimony as free people–-to do, as the above writer advised, what we ought to do to preserve our heritage of freedom. This legacy began in the hoary mists of the past, as God’s Word proclaimed, “And you will know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32); continued with the struggles between various English classes (commoners. barons, and nobility) that yielded the first Magna Charta in 1215; that declared in Scotland’s Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 that “For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any condition be brought under English (tyrannical) rule”; and which culminated with Patrick Henry’s March, 1775 vow at Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Va. that freedom is worth dying for, as he gave us the immortal: “I know not what course others may take, but as for me give me liberty or give me death.” (I’ve stood on the same spot whereon he stood that immortal day. It’s a humbling experience and I strongly recommend that ALL Americans do likewise at least once).
Would any of us today make those same stern and impassioned declarations? I’d like to think that some Americans would do likewise, even in this time of freedom-shredding political correctness, the CURSE of “woke-ism”, the society destroying stupidity of “multi-culturalism” and “pronoun imbecility”, and an increasingly strident conflict between racial groups in the U.S.. As most informed patriots have long known, the 56 signers of our Declaration of Independence were willing to pay a high price in order to establish the liberty that we have historically enjoyed, and many of them did.
As Pastor C. R. Curtman wrote: “Our revolutionary ancestors were deadly serious about the cause of freedom. Of the 56 signers (of our Declaration of Independence), 17 served in the military. 11 had their homes destroyed and 5 of them were hunted down, captured and imprisoned. Signer Abraham Clark had two of his sons imprisoned on a British starving ship. John Witherspoon’s son was killed in battle, and Francis Lewis’ wife was arrested and died because of the cruel treatment inflicted upon her by her jailers. Many of the signers who had ‘pledged their fortunes’ lost everything they had in the fight for independence, and 9 of them died in the war itself.”
These brave ancestors acted, while many of their countrymen talked, or hid their heads in cowardice and refused to involve themselves in the struggle for liberty. Some of their countrymen even supported the British cause and fought against their revolutionary brethren. Many of our Founding Generation of freedom seekers realized that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” While too many Americans of today seem to have forgotten that wisdom, throughout the American story it keeps shining through, for during that long march of history millions of Americans of all ages, genders, races, and classes have done all they could to keep our country a reasonably free beacon of liberty, despite the treacherous machinations of modern-day “Tories” (members of The Klan of New Bolsheviks Party, i.e. Demoncrats), RINOS (pretend Republicans), Neo-Cons (Democrat ‘Lites’), and the titans of big multi-national corporations, vile and power-hungry globalists, and Marxists/collectivists in many forms in their efforts to undermine that liberty and “fundamentally transform” this land into a version of an all-powerful government tyranny more acceptable to their utopian “visions”, or as some might call them—their dystopian “nightmares”, instigated by their Satanically warped minds!
Lowell’s great poem forces us to recall the valor of our revolutionary ancestors, for while he wrote it for a different time and for different causes, plainly it could have applied to our Founding Generation. For those of us alive today, who struggle against the same evil impulse to trash our hallowed Constitution that is exhibited by some so-called Americans, especially the scurrilous Demoncrats, these noble words still ring true:
‘Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves
Of a legendary virtue carved upon our father’s graves;
Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? (Lines #71 - #74).
Sadly, it appears that far too many of today’s Americans are unwilling to be “heroes” of any kind, and are content to be slaves of mediocrity, of
ignorance, and of a socialist “Big Brother” government, courtesy of the lying and despicable Demoncrat Party (with the cowardly and compromising Republican Party not far behind them). Many of our people don’t know how to be “heroes for freedom”, for that noble impulse has just about been programmed out of them, particularly out of our younger generations who, even now, are being asked to carry the torch of liberty into America’s future. I fear that not only will they not be willing to carry freedom’s demanding light, which they’ve been conditioned to FEAR, but that some of them will do their best to extinguish it, while too many of the rest of them twiddle their thumbs uselessly “twittering” mindless garbage and playing endless brain damaging video games. I hope that I’m just being cynical and will be proved wrong. I really do!
God’s Word tells His people, in Psalm 44:1: “We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us what you did in their days, in days long ago.” What will our unborn descendants tell their children about what we, their ancestors, did to preserve their freedoms in this present time? How terrible, and how devastating to those of us who say we value the constitutional republic our forebears sent down the halls of time to us, if that republic no longer exists for them – if the freedom and prosperity we know (greatly diminished thanks to Comrades Obama and Biden and their Marxist fellow devils) becomes nothing more than fabled memories in their tyrannical darkness!
Our destiny as free Americans is threatened today more than it has ever been threatened. Seemingly, half of our population has been contaminated with the hate and the treacherous and treasonous anti-constitutional “disinformation” that belches forth from what I now call The Klan of New Bolsheviks Party (formerly the Democrat Party) and its kept whores of the “Main Stream Media”, its dens of Marxist anti-American hate that have long emanated from the halls of “academia”, in its quest to dismantle what our Founding Generation willed to us and replace it with a form of European Socialism (or worse), where the government (controlled by those New Bolsheviks and the globalists who control THEM) has ALL the power and the people are little more than serfs who “toe” the party line and fearfully follow the government’s commands. (Remember, a vote for Democrats at ANY time is a vote FOR the eventual destruction of the American system by the haters of freedom and constitutional restraints wisely established by our Founders.)
So what, then, is ‘freedom’s last best hope’? I’ve always believed that it is an accurately informed American electorate, composed of patriots who have educated themselves regarding the issues of liberty or despotism, two conflicting ways of living, and who are not too timid to take a stand to support liberty in every possible way, and likewise to resist tyranny with the same firm resolve that has characterized the men and women who prayed, sacrificed, fought, taught, served, and tried to perfect this imperfect but magnificent American “experiment” over the centuries, despite the determined opposition against their efforts by a despicable band of globalist/collectivist/Marxist loving and Satanically controlled schemers and plotters over the past two centuries or more, who have determined to corrupt and replace the noble, yet imperfect, constitutional republic our Founders sacrificed to send down the corridors of time to us, and replace it with a harsh and authoritarian dystopian system that only moral and political cowards would endure! Those patriots paid the price for their freedoms, and I think it is reasonable to conclude that they would expect the same from US!
Almost sixty years ago, in what was perhaps his most memorable speech titled, “A Time For Choosing” (Oct. 17, 1964), Ronald Reagan reminded his countrymen: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” I remember seeing that speech when he originally orated it back in 1964. I recently watched “The Gipper” give that speech again, and I almost came to tears at his wisdom and his vision of our possible future. Have Americans already taken that irrevocable “last step” into the darkness of despotism that Reagan warned us about? Well, have we? If you’re uncertain about this, you’d best get “informed” quickly—as in RIGHT NOW! Log onto the site of The John Birch Society (JBS.org) and discover what YOU can do to help preserve our heritage of freedom for ourselves and our posterity.
