Freedom
What is freedom to you?  Freedom is a fairly common word that is used quite a bit in our society.  How many of you have used or heard the phrase “It’s a free country, go ahead…”?  Americans use freedom so often that I don’t think we give it much thought.
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines freedom as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.  In other words, the absence of someone restricting your life.
Freedom means that you can choose which house you will live in, which person to court, whether to marry or live together, whether to have children, whether to have more than one child, where to work, your profession, your education, how hard you work, who you associate with, whether you go to church or not, which church to attend, what foods you eat, etc.  Freedom allows your parents to choose where you will be born and you have a choice of where to be buried.  In America, freedom has touched your life every moment from the time you were born until your demise.  Freedom is so common in this country that we seldom give it a second thought.
I once met a man that had come here from one of the European Baltic states that was governed by the former Soviet Union.  I asked him the normal questions about how he liked America, etc.  I asked him how he was able to leave his country to begin with.  He told me that he was walking down a path one day with a friend of his and they decided, right there, to run for freedom.  So they took off running for the border, for the chance a freedom.  He said he made it and his friend didn’t.  Wow, mixed emotions.  He now had freedom but he lost his friend in the process.  Also, now he would never have contact with his family again.
During the time of our conversation many of the Baltic States were seceding from the Soviet Bloc and I asked him what their citizens thought of their new found freedom.  His response shocked me.  He told me that those people did not understand the true meaning of freedom.  Here is a paraphrase of what he said:
Freedom does mean all the warm, fuzzy, good feeling choices are yours to make.  Yes it is great to be free, to travel in peace, to make day to day decisions about your life.  But, freedom also has a dark side.  Freedom means you can be homeless.  Freedom means you can go hungry.  True freedom means that no one is obligated to take care of you when things aren’t going your way.  The citizens of the Baltic States, like many of us, had not considered that part.  The citizens were upset with their new governments because their needs were not getting met.  They were expecting the government to make up any short comings that they had in their lives.
So, here we are in “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”  We have our freedoms but there has to be another side of that coin.

It’s called responsibility.  Stay tuned.