The time is approaching. We will all exercise one of the most sacred rights of a free people. We will vote to elect our national leadership.
In light of this awesome responsibility, I find myself reflecting again on some important distinctions. We have been founded as a nation on liberty, the freedom that allows each of us to become all we can be, the freedom that creates a space or state of being that allows us to realize ourselves to the full.
This is indeed a blessing, and was named such by our founding fathers. So freedom is a climate where free choice can choose the good, the true, the beautiful. It is the milieu where humans can become truly human.
The means to this becoming is freedom of choice. We need to decide what we shall be by what we do. By our freedom of choice we realize and create a true state of freedom.
But there is a fly in the ointment. Free choice can also be used to stomp all over your newly planted front lawn. It can be used to rob you of your life savings. It can be used to destroy a fetus.
At this sacred time of elections I suggest we Americans clean up our muddled use of these terms. Freedom as envisioned by our founding fathers is a state of being where human beings flourish. Free choice needs to be regulated by law, for its use has the power to destroy the very freedom for which we became a nation.
To equate freedom and free choice puts us on the pathway to that very danger. In such a blurring, whatever hampers my free choice violates my God-given freedom. Not so. When my judgment is such that I think I can take your life (or that of the unborn) by an exercise of my free choice, then we need to pause and ask whether this makes us more truly human, more truly free. Or does it lead to that slippery slope of anarchy, where I do what I want when I want, and you don’t dare reign me in? What am I using my free choice for?
We are a great nation. We deserve better than verbal valium.
