HEADlines: Will We Let Freedom Slip Through Our Fingers?

Published in The Mustard Seed Sentinel, Saturday, October 23, 2021.

“I cannot help feeling that Tocqueville hit the nail on the head, as he often did, when he wrote that the type of despotism democratic people have to fear will in no way look like the despotism and tyranny our ancestors endured: ‘It would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them,’ he wrote in 1840. And, in a way, the fact that it happens more gradually is what makes it arguably even more dangerous. After all, a people that do not realize they are losing their freedom will not fight for it. They will simply let it slip through their fingers.” Eva Vlaardingerbroek~

Freedom is like a plant we hold in our hands. We must be diligent to care for it, or it will fall through our fingers and be gone forever.

The battle for the heart and soul of America challenges every generation. Sometimes, the enemies are readily identified—World War II’s fascism and genocide, the Cold War’s communistic atheism, nuclear threat, and genocide.

In Vietnam, we had trouble identifying the enemy. Those loyal to the North did not have “Viet Cong” tattooed across their foreheads. We faced the same challenge in Afghanistan and anywhere else war plays out in terrorism.

We’ve spent the last 20 years at war, never losing, but never quite winning either. The final act of our tragedy included no semblance of victory. Only capitulation and betrayal.

For those at home, the war remained far away. It required no material sacrifice. Some families saw sons and daughters go who never returned. But for most of us, life went on as usual. We never really felt war’s threat, its reality.

Our prosperity and comfort lulled us to sleep.

As we stew like frogs in our proverbial pot of water that is coming to a full boil, inflation akin to that of the 1970s abounds. A new push to raise taxes comes as we already feel the pincers of higher costs and less availability of goods.

Our country is roiling in fury over COVID regulations and vaccine mandates, which have contributed to empty store shelves and an uneasiness that Soviet-style shortages loom ahead.

Add to that a refusal on the part of many prosecutors to prosecute crimes—to do the job entrusted to them. The ensuing uptick in crime has caused stores to close, cutting law-abiding citizens off from needed goods.

The government suggests a cure-all that will work as all others always have and always will. The cure will spread, not COVID, but emptier shelves and more suffocating costs.

Government intervention has crippled our world-class healthcare system. Bureaucratic vaccine mandates now threaten to finish it off altogether with personnel shortages. Top-notch medical care will be a thing of the past as we come to understand experientially what it’s like to live in a third-world country with Venezuelan inflation, food shortages, and insufficient healthcare.

But some are waking up.

When Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAulliffe stated, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they can teach,” many parents disagreed.

Battle lines formed as parents protest Critical Race Theory and what they consider COVID overreach.

Following outcries at local school board meetings (note, local), the National Association of School Boards has asked the US Department of Justice to intervene. The DOJ readily agreed to step in and determine “how to use federal resources to prosecute offending parents.”

Notice that the organization representing local school boards didn’t suggest climbing a chain of authority starting with cities’ mayors or even the governors of states. They didn’t ask for increased security in the face of what they perceive to be threats, but what reasonable people would define as caring, concerned, albeit angry parents.

An organization representing local school officials went straight to the feds.

And the feds were quick to sign on to the task at hand—shutting down speech that disagrees with the already configured program.

In the meantime, Citizens are fleeing the high taxes and over-regulation of California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois and are voting with moving vans on their way to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona.

And even as inflation increases, more parents are placing their children in private schools.

How will events unfold when entities like the DOJ and FBI crackdown on protesting parents? (Note the application of the phrase crackdown to the US, not, as is more typical, China.)

We won’t like the answer to the previous question if we ask Retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Tom Caldwell. Caldwell went to Washington, DC, on January 6 to hear President Trump speak. Caldwell did not enter the Capitol. He did not engage in destructive or violent behavior. He led no group of insurrection-minded agitators.

DOJ now concedes that they were wrong in accusing Caldwell of the crimes listed above, imprisoning him (including solitary confinement for 49 days) and depriving him of life-sustaining medications during his incarceration.

He is “free” (for now) but on the edge of bankruptcy.

We cannot trust those who promised to uphold the Constitution and are supposed to protect us and our God-given freedoms. They betray us at every turn.

When Rod Serling wrote the script to “The Obsolete Man” for The Twilight Zone series in 1961, he may have been looking back to Nazi Germany or around the world to the Soviet Union. Instead, perhaps, he was looking into a crystal ball and seeing us—the boiling frogs who fell asleep.

The speaker quoted below from “The Obsolete Man” episode is a government official sentencing a “useless” librarian to death.

“But their [the oppressors of the past] error was not one of excess it was simply not going far enough! Too many undesirables left around and undesirables eventually create a corps of resistance. Old people for example, clutch at the past and won’t accept the new. The sick, the maimed, the deformed, they fasten onto the healthy body and damage it. So WE eliminate them! And people like yourself, they can perform no useful function for The State, so…we put an end to them.” Rod Serling.

We now know that there are more ways than one to eliminate someone and silence others. How many like Tom Caldwell will the government push toward or into bankruptcy? We may never know since corporate media will not give them a voice.

Those who work to end freedom will not stop while we still sleep.

We must wake up and speak up now, or freedom will slip through our fingers and be gone forever.

Photo Credit: Pexels on pixabay.com

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

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