Pure, Transparent Freedom

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.  ~Simone de Beauvoir

Freedom is a beautiful and noble ideal to which we should all aspire each day. Freedom is made of the individual rights of all the people who make up the world. If even one person's freedoms are railroaded for convenience sake, we all suffer for it. And, I am saddened to say that here in my own country, I see freedom eroding bit by bit each day as our government throws our civil liberties to the wind.

But history is littered with such episodes where fascists, despots, or simply brutes have taken the rights of the common man and woman and destroyed them. At one such frightening time in history, Sir Thomas More was one man who stood against the brutishness of his sovereign. And as he said, so bravely and beautifully in response to his son-in-law, William Roper, who asks him if he would "give the Devil the benefit of the law?" in A Man for All Seasons,

SIR THOMAS MORE: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!   

Sir Thomas More, by the way, was the only man willing to stand in opposition to Henry VIII when he was trying to seek a divorce from his lawful wife in order to marry Anne Boleyn. The King asked More too much when he asked that he betray his own conscience and agree to vote for the alteration of the laws prohibiting his divorce from a woman whom had in no way injured or betrayed him. Thomas More, sadly, spent his remaining years being tortured in the Tower of London and ended up with his head on a spike.

Such tragic instances as Thomas More's are sadly too commonplace in history. There are so many countless people who have stood against authority when authority was plainly wrong. Few of them, however, lived to tell of the tale.

We live now in dangerous times when people like More are difficult to find. You might come across one here or there, perhaps in an Abby or hidden away as a hermit. They are hidden because they know the world and what it is capable of. 

It's time to ask yourself a hard question: "Are you waiting for someone else to be your hero, or are you willing to stand for something?"

I am ready to stand for one thing and one thing only: Freedom. The beautiful freedom Thomas Payne spoke so brilliantly of when he shouted, "Give me liberty or give me death."

I think it's time now, my friends, to remember that freedom is lost for everyone when we allow anyone to be abused in the name of the law. Stand for liberty, for EVERY American citizen's liberty, not just your own.