We cannot enforce liberty.
We cannot enforce freedom. We can only get out of its way.
What does that mean?
- Jon O
To me, it means, for instance, that America freed African slaves not by limiting any man's freedom, but by preventing man's enslavement. There is a huge difference. We didn't give slaves anything that didn't already exist in them, granted by God and nature.
Some may think it clever to suggest that we limited a slaveowners' freedom by preventing him from owning the slaves he already had, but ... seriously? That's not freedom. Denying one the "right" to be a slaveowner is but to reject the desire to be a tyrant (no matter how localized it may be), a better-than, someone who is above another.
In other words, preventing slave owning can be only one thing: FREEDOM REALIZED. You can relate that extreme example to a lot of issues: gun ownership, holding a job, getting medical care, and more. It is no more a freedom to be able to own slaves than it is liberty to be given welfare by a government that can, by design, do nothing without the money of the citizens and their permission, however knowingly.
Slave owning was not a freedom and had nothing all at to do with liberty, but had only to do with the law of men. People went so far as to citing the Bible, incorrectly, to justify slavery. Contrary to some people's thinking, the Declaration of Independence had nothing in it about the ideas of slavery. It was a trap America was in, back then.
Our rights are natural things -- THIS IS in the Declaration. We put rights into laws because not everyone is bright or decent or sane enough to appreciate what is a right and what isn't. In short.
It is troubling to me how people don't seem to think government can only take away liberty or provide tyranny. Government cannot give liberty or freedom. I struggle to understand why people think freedom can be enforced. It cannot. It can only be taken away, if not by government, then by some other noisy, self-anointed entity, or by one's self.
We are all slaves to our own "traps," even if those are traps that others have led us into. It is up to us to get out of those traps, not necessarily alone, but it is vital to recognize our own responsibility or culpability (a harsh synonym for "responsibility," it means being deserving of blame). Some think it is the job of government to find us the steps out of all of our traps. That's a two-bladed sword that is often used against common folks by those who like power. That would ber great if government were really culpable for it's actions, but the citizens, in truth, are the ones stuck with the mess made by government, not the government. We've seen signs of that of late, haven't we? The collapse of 2008 did little to government, but decimated careers, lives, families, businesses.
Relying on government to remove traps from our lives is stepping from one trap -- perhaps a personal trap -- into another, more broad trap. The concept of slavery was such as trap, in the 1700s and 1800s, for many Americans (not just Americans, but we were the most entrenched with slavery in our economy at the time).
The freedom that is mankind's is given by nature, by God, by our simple existence. It is not something government provides, and it should not be government's place to do anything but defend that right. A most troubling thing that seems to have been a trend for many years here is this idea of privilege to government goodies. This, in turn, is something I've seen become misunderstood in other places, since we are supposed to be the "leader of the free world."
Many across the world, in a certain simplicity of hope, think all good things may come from government. From that idea many monsters have been borne. This country, though, was borne from a better idea: government is not the leader nor master to society, it is merely a servant. How things have changed. I think that we've gotten too far away from that real, amazing idea of government-as-servant. We have a president in 2013, Barack Obama, who chastises the people, or the businesses, or whole industries, for not doing their part in serving government a bigger platter of tax dollars. After Sept. 11, one of Bush's actions was to create the DHS, which was supposed to streamline government and improve national security, but has mostly proven to only make government larger and liberty more restrained. These are real signs that government is too full of itself these days.
We aren't given freedom by government. It was always ours, and the Founding Fathers and patriots of the 1770s knew this.
If we choose to let any government take freedom and liberty from us, then we are fools who get what we deserve. Let's instead be patriots who get what the original American patriots fought for.
A long piece that is a great bit of insight into the age when slavery was still legal was a speech made by Frederick Douglass. While for many it may not all click, since it is written in the style of the mid-1800s, please try to read it.
At least, read the portion starting with "While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it." This is what America is in the words of a freed slave.
- Jon O