The reason our freedom is dying is because we do not live free.
We have indentured ourselves to servitude in the name of comfort and security without thinking about the consequences. We submit ourselves every day to our employers, our banks, our bills, our televisions. When we get tired of taking care of our own interests, we demand that someone else take care of them for us. We hand over our right to determine our education, our retirement, our health care without a thought of what the cost might be.
Meanwhile, we lament the decline in station such servitude brings. We wonder why fewer kids graduate, why those who graduate know less, why so few of those graduates innovate and thrive. We wonder why our jobs go overseas, why other countries seem to be doing better, why things here seem less comfortable than before.
In two hundred years, we have gone from a nation of rebels, patriots, and pioneers to a nation of workers, consumers, and drones. In a hundred years, we have gone from a people self-sufficient and capable of dealing with depressions and world wars to a people incapable of saving more than we spend and uncomfortable letting even the one percent who volunteered to defend liberty do so.
Our freedom is dying because we do not live free.
We have sacrificed liberty to gain a little security, and in doing so we have wounded, perhaps mortally, the very ideals we still somehow manage to pay hypocritical lip service to. We want someone to do something about this wound, so long is that someone is not us and the doing does not require us to change.
We invoke the sacrifices of our forebears as some sort of defense of our own apathy even as we kill their independence with our own refusal to be independent. They were farmers and businessmen. We are employees. They thrived by their own hard work and initiative. We destroyed what they had because it was easier to buy from corporate farms and China.
We have given up on the American dream because dreaming is hard. Dreaming requires risk. Dreaming requires action. Dreaming requires us to give up four hours of television and weekends at the lake for working from dawn until dusk at whatever vocation suits us best.
Our freedom is dying because we do not live free.
DLH
We should have been smart enough to have liberty and convenience. Our government made us broke with not much promise of producing, true liberty. We walked too soft and did not carry, a big enough stick. We were tread on. We have liberty and we shall have death. We might yet have joy if we haven’t already.
It sounds like you think we are slaves to things.
A lot of people are slaves to a lot of things DJ, even if not all of us are. Whether any of us are innocent of the things I have observed, collectively we have fallen prey to all of them.
The truth is we have replaced God with many little gods. We worship money and things and celebrity. We get our news from Entertainment Tonight. We study People magazine instead of the Bible. It always filters back to the family. Parents are not raising their children in the “fear and admonition of the Lord”. The end result is a nation who wants without working; who expects without giving.