Whatever Happened To Freedom?

"Give me liberty or give me death!"  Patrick Henry, 1775

America is truly unique among the nations of the world in that the nation was founded upon an ideal, and not simply a man or group of men in quest for power.  The unique American ideal is freedom, or liberty.  Now, man has aspired to live free since time began.  But America has made that freedom very real, not just for its own citizens for a world to still looks to America for inspiration.  In less than a month, America will celebrate its 237th year of independence from Great Britain.  Politicians and leaders of all stripes will stand and give speeches extolling the virtues of freedom and laud it as the American ideal.

But, these same leaders and politicians will do something entirely different.  We are slowly losing our freedom, bit by bit.  Freedom, or liberty if you will, is now treated as a Christmas decoration.  Our national leaders haul it out once a year for the appropriate holiday, but when the day is over, it is put in a box and neatly stored away, not to be seen or heard from again until the holiday rolls around again next year.  As a child of the 1980's, I still remember President Reagan practically nauseating us all with his extensive references to freedom and liberty.  As Mandy Pitinkin said to Wallace Shawn in the movie, The Princess Bride, about the word inconceivable: "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIP6EwqMEoE).  But he did know freedom's meaning and it was us that apparently did not know what it means.

The First Amendment
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

This amendment is becoming more and more of a distant memory everyday.  More and more we hear about our government electronically monitoring our citizens.  And it keeps getting worse.  It is not just an Obama thing.  President George W Bush did it, too.  And both Democrats and Republicans in Congress applaud our government for its electronic surveillance.  Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said that it was justified to weed out "potential terrorists".  What?  Whatever happened to Probable Cause that is required for warrants in the Fourth Amendment?  Potential terrorist is not probable cause.  This current Administration's monitoring of the press harkens back to the days of Richard Nixon.  Nixon was extremely paranoid and he thought the press was out to get him.  In all fairness, the press hated him with a passion even before Watergate.  But Nixon's "Plumber's Unit" went so far as to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's (author of the Pentagon Papers) psychiatrist to try to dig up dirt on the writer.  Obama's henchmen meanwhile used the IRS to target Tea Party groups to suppress free speech, and accused a Fox News reporter of being a "co-conspirator" in an espionage activity (most credible journalists stand behind the Fox News reporter, noting it was just good investigative reporting.  I agree).

What we are seeing here is an erosion of the basic First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.  This goes even further.  Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said recently that he wonders what kind of constitutional protections bloggers and tweeters have.  What??  Bloggers and Tweeters have a constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech!  And the speech that our Founding Fathers most wanted to protect:  Political speech.  Every single one of our nation's Founding Fathers would have been hanged by the British had we lost the Revolutionary War, primarily for their outspoken criticism of the British government that led to the armed rebellion in the first place.  They had quite an appreciation for free speech and specifically stated that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.  Now we must wonder about that as we see the abuse of Section 215 of the Patriot Act (passed largely by the Republicans in Congress and signed into law by President Bush in 2001).

Born Free
On June 4, testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee about IRS harassment, Becky Gerritson of the Wetumpka, Alabama Tea Party said this, "I am not here as a serf or vassal. I am not begging my lords for mercy. I’m a born free American woman, wife, mother, and citizen. And I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for my well-being and to monitor my speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. Your post, the post that you occupy, exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty. And you have faltered.”  I agree with her sentiments and believe they are well stated.  The prevailing attitude in Washington is that the government is our master.  The government is our servant!  I wish they would remember that.  And I wish the government's number one duty is to protect, preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States instead of looking to pervert it any way possible.

What we are seeing with our leaders' attitude is an erosion of freedom.  We most obviously see the erosion in freedom of speech and freedom of the press.  But what about our economic freedom?  We are seeing a huge erosion here.  Of course, we see it in the tax imposed on citizens to buy healthcare.  You may argue that any prudent person would buy health insurance anyway, and this is largely true.  But the act of purchasing such a product should be voluntary, not mandatory.  And the President's next target is retirement.  Yes, the President actually proposed in his 2013 budget to start the process of cashing in everyone's retirement savings (i.e. 401 (k)'s) and issuing government checks to ensure those of retirement age a "reasonable retirement".  If you want an "extraordinary" retirement, you're out of luck.  Whatever happened to our ability to buy our own stuff in the market place?  I know that still exists, but will we soon be told what cars we can and cannot buy, or the homes we can and cannot buy?  Or even what occupation or career we will pursue?

The bigger point here is that our freedoms are being eroded.  Our right to free speech is being attacked, as are our freedom of the press and our economic freedom.  Thomas Jefferson once said, "Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."  What we see happening before our very eyes is the devolution of freedom into tyranny.  Over the last 20-25 years, the rest of the world has sought to throw off the shackles of oppressive government and we seem to be pursuing it.  Once again, I come back to Jefferson who said, "A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circlue of our felicities."  And as President Reagan said in his first inaugural address, "If no one is capable of governing himself, who among us is capable of governing another?"  Of course, an arrogant elite in Washington is thinking more and more they know what is best for us.  Government today is overstepping its bounds and in the process is eroding our freedoms. 

Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times on June 8, (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/dowd-peeping-president-obama.html?_r=0) quoted from George Orwell's "1984", “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.” This was the scary stuff that the Soviet Union would aspire to do to control its people according to Orwell.  What is so scary today is not that this is happening in an oppressive dictatorship.  It is happening in the United States, the world's bastion of freedom!

We Need A Revolution
I am not saying we need to take up arms at this time.  The revolution we need is an attitude adjustment in Washington.  We need an attitude that says the government is the servant of the people.  When I say that, I am not referring to civil servants who carry out the laws passed by Congress.  There may be some arrogant civil servants.  But the real arrogance lies in a leadership that thinks it knows what we need better than we do.  And a government that "takes care of us" but only in a manner that feeds the ruling party's political constituents.  Both Democrats and Republicans are thoroughly broken.  We do not have leaders, we have a bunch of puppets.  Both sides are just looking to advance their own ideologies, good governance be damned.  America has always been blessed with great leaders at times of national crisis.  Today, the crisis is leadership, and our current leaders' only solution appears to be to diminish our freedoms.  Abraham Lincoln warned us, "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Notes
For more quotes on freedom and liberty from Thomas Jefferson (and he has many), go to the following:  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/thomas_jefferson.html

For more quotes from Ronald Reagan, go the following: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/ronald_reagan.html

For more quotes from Abraham Lincoln, go to the following:  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/abraham_lincoln.html

For more quotes from Patrick Henry, go to the following:  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/patrick_henry.html