LIBERTY - WHAT IS IT?
It seems to me that right now is a rather poor time for us to be considering what we mean by "liberty."
By this time we should certainty know precisely what we mean by "liberty" in both a political and social sense. This is a time when we are engaged in military campaigns which urge other nations to follow our example. This is a time when we are actually forming government structures to set up free, democratic governments based on liberty and understanding, and it seems unwise to question the basic premise of our own beliefs.
Yet, as I read today's news, I find individuls and groups who are critical of the present administration's handling of internal and external affairs. Some of those fault-finding schemes strike at the fundamental concept of "Liberty", itself.
Louis D. Brandeis, as a former Supreme Court Jusitice, said in the year 1928: "Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties... they valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty." Then, in 1932, speaking of that same liberty, Justice Brandeis added: "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
In their eagerness to present themselves in an engaging light before voters, some aspirants for the presidential role have made statements concerning the conduct of the war which qualify them for Brandeis' classification of those set forth with plenty of zeal but with little real understanding.
These individals and groups currently attempting to say that the war is futile and our handing of it muddled, should also remind themselves of the words by a man who led us in time of a previous war. "Therefore"...he concluded after much discussion on the state of liberty in the our land," the only sure bulwark to contining liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people." The iniitals which accompany that statement are "F.D.R."
Abraham Lincoln, another wartime president, commented: "The world has never had a good definition of liberty and the American people are now much in want of one. We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not mean the same thing."
Some citizens are voicing negative feelings today with "much zeal, well-meaning," in their view, but with little real understanding."
A.L.M. Nov. 4, 2003 [c430wds]
