Five Shots of Optimism for Freedom-Lovers

1. I see no truth in the political left's insistence that history marches inexorably toward some Marxist utopia. Those who most often resort to ludicrous claims that their opponents are "on the wrong side of history" usually have little to no understanding of anything that has taken place before their adolescence. I do believe there is an uncanny repetition throughout human history in which many of the same ideas and conflicts emerge, burn brightly, and rudely disappear until they are made new again. The fight for human freedom is a fundamental part of this cycle, and the political left continues to be on the wrong side of liberty.

2. I believe that freedom and personal liberty are natural rights that come from God, yet unscrupulous people use deception and force to keep others in bondage. I believe that history is dotted with hard-fought struggles for freedom achieved by people who slowly take for granted freedom's existence and forget the dear price once paid before languishing and allowing themselves to be enslaved yet again. I also believe, however, that every population exposed to freedom, when finally awakened to its disappearance, will struggle for its return and pass that fight from one generation to the next over the course of decades, centuries, and even millennia. There is a powerful drive within the human soul to be free.

3. I believe that good ultimately triumphs over evil, but man is not in charge of that timeline. I do not pretend to understand God's will. I do not know whether God's gift of freedom will triumph over evil in this lifetime, or whether the events of today will only be referenced in the future, long after we are gone, as inspiration for final victories we'll never see.

Shurk is a good man. But he needs to understand there can be no freedom unless we secure it for ourselves. We cannot wait for freedom to just COME as a natural evolution from the Almighty.

I guess Samuel Adams was guilty of the same impatience:

Adam’s Excerpt from Speech to State Assembly, Philadelphia, August 1st, 1776:

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“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.”

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Shurk, i hope you like it.

A system based on limited government and personal freedom (and its correlate, personal responsibility) was something nearly unheard of in human history. As Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America, it worked very well for the people that invented it, but not for others. We are no longer that people largely because of "diversity." We had a pretty good run for a couple of hundred years, about what Jefferson predicted.

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