Ronald Reagan
“Liberty once lost, is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.”
~John Adams
Give us Liberty or -- What?
Patrick Henry understood the dichotomy our forefathers faced. And now we face the same options. We all see liberty slipping away -- no, being yanked out of our hands by forces so evil we can barely wrap our Pollyanna brains around it. Here? This can be happening here? We warn about losing our freedom. We give examples -- COVID mandates, travel restrictions, educational issues, etc. ad nauseam -- but Biden supporters still exist. RINO Republicans still exist. The swamp is still full of monsters. The situation has made me realize that too few people seem to understand what freedom and liberty really mean.
Freedom is not some vague red-white-and-blue theme song. It’s not drums beating and marching bands. It’s not just a feel-good flag to wave. It’s something that generations fought, bled, and died for, so shouldn’t it have some solidity to it? Shouldn’t it be something palpable, heavy, and real -- something you can grab hold of? Lofty ideas are necessary, but, like helium balloons, they have to be tied to something solid or they just float away.
Freedom, where it exists, produces remarkable results. Freedom allows us to be good, to be our best. Harrison Bergeron, in the Kurt Vonnegut short story of the same name, says toward the end, “Watch me become what I can become.” Because he was so superior -- in mind, body, determination, and courage -- he had been made to endure terrible handicaps to keep those around him from feeling inferior (even though they were). He makes that declaration as he defiantly rips off the bags of lead weights and removes the mask that made him ugly.
Freedom allows us to -- like Harrison -- become what we can become. What an exhilarating idea! What happens when we are not dissuaded from excellence? (And that’s exactly what CRT and all its adjacent claptrap does -- dissuades us from excellence.) What happens when we get out of each other’s way?
When no alphabet agency is intercepting our email, we can exchange ideas. And when no one is watching our pronouns, or editing our speech, we can express ourselves. When we do that and express a lame idea -- like the 1619 Project -- we can lay it open and expose its wormy guts. Without freedom, we can’t do that. We have to swallow whatever bilge they want to feed us.
Each of us is born with a conscience and that conscience has to be free to operate. We all know deep in our souls that grooming small children to accept sexual deviance is wrong and damaging to the child, but in a controlled society, where such behavior is favored by those in high places, those who object are labeled terrorists and hounded into silence. It is true that in a free society not everyone will choose to follow his conscience, but in a community made up largely of good, God-fearing people, that won’t be a problem because those good folks will express their disdain for all that is evil and will drive it from them. Very few formal laws will be necessary.
But in a community where the citizens celebrate evil, it will prosper, and then, to make the society function at all, laws and regulations abound because the people will not control themselves. Evil hurts everyone. Good helps everyone.
But, you say, isn’t freedom about doing whatever you want to do? No. It’s about being the best you can be -- not about being the worst you can manage. It’s about having the leeway to create, not destroy. It’s about building, not about tearing down. It’s not about lounging around smoking weed; it’s about working, becoming, and expanding. Our Declaration of Independence talks about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The burgeoning suicide rate should show us that we’re no longer catching up with happiness in spite of silencing our shared conscience.
Freedom produces prosperity. Those who are free to study, to learn, to practice, to experiment, to tell the truth -- those people make things, things other people want and are willing to work to obtain. It creates an ever-climbing vortex energized by the human desire to excel. Why is it that the rich keep working? Because they want to become all they can become. The more rules and regulations placed on people, the less they will engage in productivity, and the less creative they become. The more we are restricted, the more energy we must expend in order to get around the restrictions. (I’ve never understood why the Left thinks it can pass a law and everyone will just get in line and obey. History proves that’s not how it works.)
Freedom is not only prosperity, which carries a sense of luxury and affluence, but it is life itself. How did Stalin maintain control of the people of westernmost parts of the Soviet Union? He starved them to death -- some 20 million of them. That is the ultimate control. But without freedom, starvation will happen naturally. If farmers can no longer have access (because of too much regulation -- see Sri Lanka) to good seeds, decent soil, fertilizer, and farm equipment, they can’t grow what we all need to eat. If farmers can’t afford to get their crops to market, if there aren’t enough processing plants -- I mean, I wouldn’t know what to do with a cow if you gave me one -- then there will be no food in the stores. If supplies get too short, but money is too easy to come by then everything will cost more and we can’t afford it even if it is grown, processed, and delivered. Without food, we have no freedom. Without freedom, we have no food.
Without education, we have neither. I don’t mean indoctrination -- I mean the telling of truth to our children. We have lied to them now for several generations and now they are largely ignorant of the truths of science, literature, history, civics, math, and most practical skills. If we are to have both the necessities of life and some of the niceties, we have to have freedom, but if we don’t have an intelligent, well-informed populace we can’t have that liberty. Those man-on-the-street pop quizzes give me the willies -- people who vote and yet don’t know the first thing about either the history or geography of this country. It’s no wonder we have a White House stocked with ignoramuses.
I have no doubt that we are going to have to stand with Patrick Henry and demand liberty or be willing to give our lives to gain it for others. We are going to have to fight. We can fight by informing ourselves -- try some of the free online classes from Hillsdale College or the Patriot Academy. We can fight at school board meetings. We can fight to support those who are fighting -- buying and reading their books, reading their articles, watching their podcasts. We can fight by talking and writing ourselves. We can fight best by making sure that we, and our families, are lined up with the God of the Universe because it is ultimately He who will either save or abandon this nation.
Z*Z*Z Source:
*****
Liberty Lost
I have found it exceedingly difficult for me to understand why so many Americans are willing to obey unconstitutional orders to stay in their homes and acquiesce to having the economy shut down. I have seen many people online express complacency with this. I have had several discussions online regarding the lockdowns. I also know people who have lost family members to this disease, so I am not trying to minimize their pain or loss. Be that as it may, too many Americans seem to have fallen prey to the narrative of fear that the government and the leftist media have been pushing. Neil Ferguson’s model, which had the death toll from the Wuhan Coronavirus projected to be 2.2 million souls, turned out to be wildly inaccurate. 2.2 million people dead is unquestionably a scary number, which prompted the “do something” reflex in our political class. Doing something for the sake of appearing as though you’re doing something often leads to doing the wrong thing. There is another scary number out there right now though. 30 million. As of this writing, over 30 million people have filed for unemployment benefits since this started. That puts the unemployment rate at about 14%. These numbers keep getting scarier, don’t they? However, they have nothing to do with the Wuhan Coronavirus; rather our reaction to it. Just to pile on the fear factor, the scariest part of all of this is that there are people, American citizens, on both sides of the political aisle that find this acceptable.
You may be wondering how this happened. It directly results from our education system. Over the years I have spoken to members of the baby boomer generation and their predecessors, the silent generation, about the state of education in this country. This includes my parents, parents, and grandparents of my friends and acquaintances. Almost to a person, they told me that the education they got in high school and college is far more advanced than what kids today get in public school and college. I had one person tell me that their high school diploma is worth more than a bachelor’s degree from just about any college in the country, with a few exceptions. They had to learn Latin; they had to learn basic chemistry and physics. They studied the classics like Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, and the Bible. They discussed them; they encouraged deeper thought than just writing a report or taking a test to prove that you read them. They learned about the constitution, and how it came to be. They discussed the debates the founders had; they had to read the federalist papers, and some had to read the anti-federalist papers. They learned how the founder’s faith helped to shape how this country was formed. They learned about America and what made this country the best, most free, and prosperous country in the history of mankind. Since then, the public education system has been infiltrated by Marxists who introduced Cultural Marxism into academia. I will save the discussion of the Frankfurt School, how the intellectuals behind it came to this country and put in motion a plan to bring down western civilization for another time.
All one has to do is look at the professors on every college campus to see that most of them are Marxists themselves, indoctrinating students with their belief that capitalism is evil and creates economic disparities that are inherently unfair; the goal of society should be equal outcomes for everyone. Every generation since the baby boomers has been taught by Marxists who hate America and everything she stands for. They have pushed the belief that the founders were evil racists who owned slaves, therefore the very founding of this country is illegitimate. We now have several generations of people who were indoctrinated with the belief that capitalism is evil and the collective should reap all the benefits of your work; the government should take care of you from cradle to grave. They believe that individual responsibility is a concept that should be done away with. Marxist educators have thoroughly drilled this into their students for generations. Models have this pandemic projected to kill about as many people as the flu does every year. Or a fraction of the number of people who die from accidents, heart disease, cancer, or drug overdoses. Because so many of us have rejected personal responsibility, Many Americans believe that the Wuhan Coronavirus is a legitimate cause to shut everything down under the guise of keeping us safe. I for one will not buy into that because personal responsibility is a concept that helped build this great nation.
The classical education that generations before us received taught them how to think critically, rather than just accept the story being told and regurgitate facts. Instead of being taught how to think, subsequent generations have been taught not only what to think, but that how you feel is more important than facts, and that the individual is less important than the collective. As a result, there is a significant portion of the population who believes that shutting down the economy and quarantining healthy people is a proper response to a global pandemic, even in the face of compelling evidence which suggests that course of action is a mistake. It feels better to have the government protect us because they have “experts” who are telling us that this disease is the most dangerous one ever to come along and the only way we can be safe is to isolate ourselves. Businesses must close, employees can file for unemployment and in return for obedience, we will pay an additional unemployment benefit, so you could end up making more money than you were at your job. Meanwhile, the police state tyrants in the mayor’s offices and the governor’s mansions issue edicts directing police officers to cite and/or arrest anyone who dares defy the unconstitutional directive to shelter in place. Unless, of course, you are engaged in approved activities they deem essential. This is the textbook definition of tyranny. A significant portion of the American population has been indoctrinated to believe that this is not only ok but necessary.
This is not what the founders envisioned for this country. They fought a war to gain their independence from a tyrannical government. They wanted to be free to exercise their God-given, natural rights. In the declaration of independence, they list unalienable rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I don’t believe it is an accident that the founders listed them in that order, but let’s focus on the word liberty. Liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions or arbitrarily imposed government control on one’s way of life or behavior. It is something that the founders valued more than anything except God. Patrick Henry said, “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force: Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.” The police state tyrants are defecating all over the public liberty. There was a time when the words of the founders meant something. There was a time when Franklin’s quote, “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” was something we all believed. We valued liberty because we knew that as Americans, we have the capacity to take care of ourselves. We did not need the government to step in and protect us from the vagaries of life. Whenever we allow the government to control any aspect of our lives, they will not relinquish that control. We have allowed a dangerous precedent to be set in the wake of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic. Now that we have allowed people like Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, Phil Murphy, and Charlie Baker to impose their police state, tyrannical decrees, they, and their successors have the license to do it again. And the next time, it will be to protect us against something slightly less dangerous than a pandemic. I am sounding the alarm now because liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
Z*Z*Z Source:
Knowledge Is Power: The New Realistic Observer is a non-profit blog dedicated to bringing as much truth as possible to the readers.
Please share… Like many other fact-oriented bloggers, we've been exiled from Facebook as well as other "mainstream" social sites.
Big Tech has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers' newsfeeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share with your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family.
Keep on seeking the truth, rally your friends and family and expose as much corruption as you can… every little bit helps add pressure on the powers that are no more.
We will continue to search for alternative sites, some of which have already been compromised, in order to deliver our message and urge all of those who want facts, not spin and/or censorship, to do so as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment