DO WE PASS THE TORCH OF FREEDOM?

November 2, 2012

By: Andrea K. Robson

With four days until Election Day, panic begins to set in, as the realization of just how important this day is, has begun to set in for many people.  The exhaustion of the race is taking its toll, people are tired and weary, some ready to give up. It feels as though we have been running this race for an eternity, our legs so tired; so weak the muscles shaking as we turn the corners headed toward the finish line.  Each one of us has invested so much time, so much energy preparing for the outcome.

What is at stake here, what have we been working so hard for, what have we struggled for, knocked on countless doors, made countless phone calls, spent countless hours on line, posting, writing and reaching out to strangers for?  Is it merely a concept, or is America just a great experiment whose time has come and gone and now is the time for a Fundamental Transformation? This is the decision that faces each and every one of us as we walk up to that voting station and cast that vote. What do we believe, what do we see for the future of our country?

July 4, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was signed, and to this day is the most cherished symbol of liberty and freedom in America.  In this one document, Thomas Jefferson expressed the convictions in the hearts and minds of the American people. He captured the political philosophy, a philosophy that was not new, whose ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and other Continental philosophers of the time. What Jefferson was able to do was to summarize this philosophy in what today; we take for granted as the “self-evident truths.”  What an incredible birth of a new country, what an astounding experiment indeed to put forward! And in six short days, we decide whether or not that experiment forges on for our children, our children’s children, their children, and for generations to come, or whether this is it, this astonishing, remarkable, wonderful, magnificent and brilliant experiment comes to an end and we continue to fundamentally transform our nation into something unrecognizable.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves of what these self-evident truths are, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” We are endowed by our Creator, not by man with certain unalienable Rights….what does that mean?  These are rights that you cannot surrender, sell or transfer, they are unalienable rights. These rights are a gift from the creator to the individual and cannot under any circumstances be surrendered or taken. All individual American’s have unalienable rights. How precious are these unalienable rights; Ronald Reagan said it best when he reminded us in 1964 that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction, We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream, It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day, we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

The choice is this, either we pass the torch of Freedom onto our children, the freedom intended for us by our Founding Fathers, or we admit that we are the generation without the capacity or the desire for self-government, that we are the generation that put the nail in the coffin of what was the most unique idea in all history of man’s relation to man and we go down the path of totalitarianism.

“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too”

~W. Somerset Maugham

Copyright 2012