Posted by
AusTex on Friday, September 18, 2009 12:00:00 AM
Where does one start? Easy. First the definition of bereaved: "suffering the death of a loved one." A loved one can be a person or a principle. It goes without saying that the bereavement of a loved one's death is serious to all sane people. It should go without saying that we also recognize a larger love, the love of liberty.
Love of liberty is the common love in the United States of America. A love greater than life itself to those such as Patrick Henry and John Witherspoon and other founding fathers, whose passion for liberty and leadership changed the world's concept of government. Their example and the change they believed in was honored then and later by so many freedom lovers who gave and risked their lives to maintain freedom against the tyranny of many political rulers.
Now, we are facing another change, a different change that is moving away from the love liberty. A change led by President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Another change in the concept of government, which could lead to liberty's death. We must not suffer the bereavement of a death of liberty. How are we changing away from liberty?
Obamacare is one example that includes both a person's death and the death of a principle. There are the projected deaths of our friends and family prematurely from the highly charged and highly effective "death panel." The term death panel is literally a stretch since the health care bills don't use it, but the rhetoric certainly is reasonable. Because USA government health care certainly will be rationed as it is in the government health care systems in other countries. A government bureaucracy, a panel, will prescribe the rationing. And the rationing will result in premature deaths as well as suffering prolonged by waiting one's turn to see the doctor.
Not that President Obama will be solely responsible for the death of liberty. He is the leader of the pack, though. And apparently he embraces the change away from liberty. A change founded on the principle that a few elected office holders can, should, must, dictate the people's actions, attitudes and even thoughts, and control everyone's lives. Control through government-run health care, home mortgages, banking, investment banking, student loans, to name a few. We must remember a vote or an election is not a relinquishment of liberty Nevertheless, we all have responsibility for liberty's lingering death march in a parade of horribles.
What is most toxic to freedom has to be dishonesty and corruption - an absence of truth. Remember the verse from the Book of John: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." And the passage in, what is it, Revelations, about the false prophets. Samuel Adams knew the importance of truth and virtue: "If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav'd." [Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, February 12, 1779].
Our national dept is a major inhibitor of freedom. Such a huge obligation to others must me seen as a huge limit on freedom. The Democrats' lust for growing the national debt with huge annual deficits is astounding.
And there's neglect. Too many of us just don't get involved in a myriad of issues for as many reasons. How else, for example, could so many Acorn workers have become so cruelly immoral except under the darkness of neglect, an absence of the light of transparency that is enabled by virtuous people not bothering to learn what is going on. But the audacity of killing liberty has awakened a new generation of freedom fighters. Not just James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles. But also tens of thousands of ordinary citrizens whose participation in the twentieth century's tea parties marks an epiphany of sorts. Our freedoms depend on a rebirth of the passion of liberty.