June 18, 2009

Freedom! Is It Still In Us?

“This is the truth I tell you: of all things freedom’s most fine.

 Never submit to live, my son, in the bonds of slavery entwined."

Proverb reportedly taught to William Wallace by his uncle.

Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, my family and I visited relatives in the once and future German capital and went to the zoo, where I watched the antics of a bear from the safe side of a moat and a tall fence.

The beast was, at first, humorous to behold. It would repeatedly take a few steps forward, stop and bounce into reverse – like one of those videos where action is played forward and backward to create the impression that an animal is dancing. Except after a very few moments, the scene stopped being funny. It became clear that the brute was frustrated to the point of psychosis by his confinement.

Come on, one might think. Here is a very fortunate animal indeed. Three squares a day of his favorite food – or however many a plus-size critter of the ursine persuasion might require; the best veterinary care; comfy, tax-and-mortgage free shelter; and unquestionably, all the opportunity for action with the bear babes a fellow could want.

The problem was that it very simply isn’t in the nature of most bears – who in the wild can roam up to 100 miles in search of food – to thrive in zoos.

Which brings me to a check of the headlines these days. The president of the United States firing and hiring CEOs at America’s largest companies – and the boss lady at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, for goodness sake, clamoring for the head of the top man at its biggest bank.

Uncle Sam commanding enterprises what they can pay staff and in what countries they can and can't do business; dictating to shareholders and bondholders how much of their property rights they might maintain; determining what kinds of cars nationalized automakers can make and we can drive, and what kind of fuel we can use and how much; preparing to mandate what kind of health insurance we must obtain, and who, including and especially the government, may provide it; and deciding, through the choices for our courts, who gets to go to what school or get which job, what values we must live by, and what meager scraps otherwise remain of the consent of the governed.

We're told this is all for our own good: To save jobs, save banks, save money, save lives, save the planet, preserve fairness and promote “diversity” and “choice.”

Those are all very good things. But even if the government will be able to achieve some or even all of those good things, Scottish homeboy hero Wallace and his uncle had it right: The finest of things is freedom.

Not because of what free markets and free peoples will accomplish. Rather because, as our founders understood, it is in the nature of mankind to live as free beings, in control of our destinies and unconfined in our pursuit of happiness within the settled bounds of right and wrong. Because freedom is a good and right and worthy thing, in and of itself.

Good and right and worthy enough that Wallace was willing to suffer being dragged for four miles behind a horse, hanged until near dead, and emasculated, drawn and quartered while still alive.

Good and right and worthy enough that 13 colonies clinging to the coast of a yet-unsettled continent were willing to rise in revolt against the mightiest superpower of their day.

Good and right and worthy enough that students have been willing to face down tanks in Tiananmen Square, boat people to brave tempestuous seas in unsound vessels, and even today, chanting and tweeting throngs to challenge murderous mullahs.

Yet, ironically, now is the moment when we Americans seem finally about to surrender, to smooth-talking sophists and beguiling bureaucrats, something no foreign power has been able to take by force. We are about to test whether we can preserve even the smallest semblance of the essence of our experiment, the one quality above all others that continues to attract men and women to our shores and cities from every corner of our globe.

Wallace may or may not, in the midst of his tortuous sacrifice, actually have given voice to the cry so movingly portrayed at the close of his cinematic life story. But today, Americans from the Bering Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains, from Pike’s Peak to Death Valley, from North and South and East and West to the deepest heartland, from the richest to the poorest and from every race and creed and walk of life, must join as one.

Before it is too late, before the flame is snuffed out, before we submit to the siren song of Obamist utopia, mind-numbing nanny-statism and spirit-killing command and control, we must rise up and exclaim:

“Freedom!”

Is it still in us? Or will we be content to live “in the bonds of slavery entwined?”