It’s simple. One day it’s here, then another it’s not. It slips through our fingers like water, looking for every single crack and imperfection it can slip through to escape the grasp. Just like that, they’re gone. Our fights and freedoms can slip away so easy, and what’s worse is that most of us at one time or another have helped them go away.
Freedom is such an easy concept to understand, but such a difficult thing to actually keep hold of. With each passing day, we get less and less. What’s worse is that the attacks come from all angles. Not just the federal government, but state and local governments too. We will find ourselves less and less free as time rolls on unless we can stop the onslaught.
Freedom doesn’t disappear under a tyrrant’s boot. It disappears to roaring accolades and lofty ideals. The attacks aren’t against what we can agree on, but on that which is fairly easy to build consensus. Anyone can support a march to draw attention to HIV or breast cancer. But supporting a group of neo-Nazi’s right to protest in a Jewish community? That’s a lot harder.
So, someone tries to block it. Someone tries to block our use of cell phones while we’re driving, claiming it’s dangerous. Someone tries to tell us when we can buy alcohol, citing that the Lord’s Day isn’t for consuming spirits. They try to take away our guns, and claim it’s for the children. They try to take away our healthcare decisions, and claim it’s better for everyone.
Not once in this world’s history as a tyrrant not claimed that their way was the best way, that they could end whatever suffering was present with their works. That’s how so many nations came to embrace socialism with it’s lofty ideals that the state would make sure everyone worked and no one got rich off the backs of laborers. Communism laid out a system that simply claimed everyone was equal and would get the exact same, no matter what. Then, there would be nothing to challenge the equality.
Both systems are terribly flawed, and we know it. Yet these systems and ideas still persist, despite the fact that both require we lose freedom. The freedom to succeed was so basic of a freedom that the Founding Fathers never imagined there would be an attack on that. After all, there were so few places where that could happen as it were, even most monarchies were open to the peasants amassing wealth. As such, they never codified it into law.
Our rights, even the ones protected by the Bill of Rights, are hit with restrictions. We have the freedom to say what we wish…sort of. We have the right to keep and bear arms…for the most part. We have protection from illegal search and seizure…kind of. We the People, like idiots, let it go. We allowed restrictions like requiring a permit to protest. We allowed gun control to creep into our lives. We allowed the Patriot Act to errode our protections from government. We allow our states and local governments to dictate when and where we can buy alcohol. We allow all of this.
Freedom is precious. It’s sacred. It’s something that must be fought for, and you can’t do it by picking and choosing which parts of it you like. Any attack on any freedom is an attack on every freedom. All to often, I hear arguments for gun registration that say “well, we register cars, so what’s the difference?” Because they have successfully required on thing, they don’t see why you oppose it on another front. And that is how it goes away. We have let them do it once, and now they will keep going until freedom is just a memory.
Both liberals and conservatives are guilty. Conservatives rammed through the Patriot Act, while Liberals seize on gun control. Both have attacked our freedoms…but only the ones they don’t like. And there in is the crux of the problem. It’s easy to attack what you don’t like. It’s damn hard to defend that which you despise. But sometimes, what’s easy and what’s best for our freedoms aren’t exactly the same thing.
Doing what’s easy is how it disappears. And how easily it does slip away.
