January 21, 2005 - Freedom!  Liberty! Those are words that stir action in times that try men’s souls.  But what do they really mean?  A man dressed in knee britches and a cravat seated at a mahogany desk in an elegant mansion in Western Virginia wielding his goose quill desk in a battle of words had one meaning in mind when he wrote.  Those words had another meaning in the cabins of Montpelier’s servants’ quarters.   Those words had quite different meanings to each of two men born just months and miles apart in the hills of Kentucky – they meant one thing to the Mississippi planter and quite a different thing the Illinois lawyer who each led his people to war in their defense.  Freedom and liberty are quite different things to a single mother eking out a living on the hospital housekeeping staff and to the cardiac surgeon’s wife planning her daughter’s wedding.

 If freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose as Kris Kristofferson wrote and Janis Joplin sang then the homeless man sleeping under the Michigan Avenue Bridge in a hovel built from discarded scraps may be freer than are you and I.  He is at liberty and unfettered by an accumulation of articles.   He is free to roam in desperation for a meal; to shiver in the chill of the Chicago wind.  That is the definition of his freedom, of his liberty.  In a Guatemalan village liberty means only the freedom to walk north in search of opportunity for “off-the-books” exploitation that he may send his earnings home to a family in need.   His definition of freedom will be quite different than that penned in the gentile comfort of the Oval Office. 

 Freedom to speak means little when it is accompanied by the freedom to starve.   Freedom of conscience means little to a woman with an empty belly.  Liberty is an alien idea to a child held to labor in a factory under contract to make sports shoes to send across the sea to be sold for a price that would feed his parents for a year.  What is liberty to that child but the time to be a child?

 We give lip service to democracy – to the freedom of choice that we proclaim the Author of Liberty has given to each of his children while the products of oppression line the shelves of our markets in the name of trade that is not free.  It is a price we are willing to pay for our own comfort – a price to be paid out of the flesh and blood; the stunted hopes and dreams of men, women and children around the globe.  It is a price we subsidize with open wallets and collect with guns and bombs.

 Freedom! Liberty!  We consider them to be our birthright; our heritage we are called upon to share.  The world beyond our borders hears our words and read our proclamations But they measure us by what we do and not what we say.  Only when America’s deeds match her deeds will the world begin to listen and only then will the flame of Liberty begin to warm the world from oppression’s chill.