FREEDOM IS FRAGILE.
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For thousands of years, Man’s freedom has very subtly been oppressed, squashed, and demonized. Solomon decried that man could learn too much— that reading too often would lead to the weariness of the flesh— making the claim that man’s search for knowledge is where Adam and Eve went wrong— attempting to prove that man’s learning is what lead to his downfall & sin. In 1500, Francis Bacon wrote to the King— pleading with him that man could NOT learn too much— that knowledge did not contain the serpent, yet free thought continued to be crushed. In 1536, The Right Honourable Sir Thomas More refused to acknowledge Henry VIII as the Head of the Church of England— for it, he lost his head. His last words before execution were: “I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first. 19 years later, Hugh Latimer would be burned at the stake for heresy, along with the 2 other Oxford Martyrs.
Immanuel Kant, the man famously known for his belief that morality is rooted in reason, wrote in 1760 “There are many things I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say the things that I do not believe”— suggesting the idea that man should have the courage to speak his mind. It’s wild to think that in 1760, the freedom of thought had not yet been born.
Just a few years later, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat alone in a hotel room while his wife was dying in bed hundreds of miles away. He scratched words onto paper: “We find these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, given to them by their creator. Among them, life, liberty and property.” Property would later be changed to “The pursuit of happiness” to ensure that the slave trade would finally come to an end.
Man has never been as free to think as we are now— I think the impact of Jefferson’s words don’t quite pack the punch they used to the average person. Our freedom of thought has brought on more advancements than we can comprehend— anywhere from the creation of the motion-picture to the light bulb to putting a man on the moon— Americans changed the damn world.
In 1776, 56 men voluntarily signed their death warrant for a better life. They wrote words of treason & defiance— they faced the dichotomy that was living on their feet, or dying on their knees. History had shown what their inevitable demise would have been had strong men not stood up, held the line, and secured freedom in what we now know as the West. The torch of liberty is fragile, it can be extinguished much easier than it can be secured— we owe it to the generations before us not to let that flame burn out.
