Ode to Freedom





With parades, picnics, and fireworks, We will celebrate our Freedom. Freedom is ours to receive and to share with others. Freedom is gained with struggle and lived with responsibility. That is the message of July 4.
I'm not a poet, as you can see, but today is a day to remember and celebrate the good gift that freedom brings. As we celebrate, men and women in Iran, North Korea, Egypt, and elsewhere struggle to find glimpses of freedom. In Iran the powers that be are using the most coercive of techniques to take away freedom. We must not forget them, as we celebrate our own freedoms. What are those freedoms? Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of 4 freedoms, perhaps this is a good start for a 4th of July celebration:
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

(Delivered to Congress on January 6, 1941).

Comments

Anonymous said…
You wrote that?
That's a very nice, descripitive poem. David Mc

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