Freedom isn’t free

 

For more than 240 years, peoples the world over have been inspired to risk everything in pursuit of the ideals embodied in our country’s Declaration of Independence–the belief that all people are born with the right to freedom.

Jefferson framed it in these now familiar words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.”

Dennis Fradin, award-winning author–including Smithsonian Book of the Year designation in 2001– reveals in his hardcover, The Signers, “The 56 Stories Behind the Declaration of Independence,” “When they [these words] first appeared in our nation’s birth certificate, they were a call to action for a colony at the point of rebellion.

“The fifty-six men who dared to sign their name to this revolutionary document knew they were putting their reputations, their fortunes, and their very lives on the line by boldly and publicly declaring their support for liberty and freedom.”

As Benjamin Franklin, regarded as the “Sage of the Convention” declared, as he signed his name, ‘We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately!”

Benjamin Rush, a well-known and highly respected doctor and medical instructor, somberly reflected in a July 20, 1811 letter to John Adams, thirty-five years after the signing and ten years after Adam’s term as our country’s second president, ”Do you recollect the pensive and awful silence which pervaded the House when we were called up, one after another, to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants?”

Adams knew well the risks. Some eleven years prior to the drafting of our founding document, Adams addressed many of the issues in his dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.

“Be it remembered,” he cautioned, “ …liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker! But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

“We have been afraid to think,” he challenged. “We have felt a reluctance to examining into the grounds of our privileges, and the extent in which we have an indisputable right to demand them against all the power and authority, on earth.

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature … an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

“ …the fact is certain, we have been excessively cautious of giving offence by complaining of grievances. And it is as certain that American governors, and their friends and all the crown officers have availed themselves of this disposition in the people. They have prevailed on us to consent to many things, which were grossly injurious to us, and to surrender many others with voluntary tameness, to which we had the clearest right.

“Let us dare to read, think, speak and write. Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government …”

The signers of the Declaration, rather than those who voted for independence, have long been honored as the nation’s founders. That is because, by placing their names on the Declaration, they announced to the world their willingness to risk everything for the cause of independence.

The British targeted the fifty-six signers for special retribution. The homes of twelve signers were burned and seventeen lost much of what they owned. Nine signers died as a result of hardships they suffered during the Revolution, five were arrested as traitors, and two lost sons in the War; not to mention the loyal wives who languished.

Yet not one signer changed his stance on independence. All of them kept the promise they had made in the Declaration of Independence–that they would stake their “Lives …Fortunes, and …Sacred Honor” on their country’s cause.

Lest we forget, this is what we should commemorate on Independence Day!

“Freedom isn’t free. It shouldn’t be a bragging point that, ‘Oh, I don’t get involved in politics,’ as if that makes someone cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn’t insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.” – Bill Maher