Let Freedom Ring

Six years ago, on July 5, 2010 I posted a weblog I titled “The Day After.”  It basically referred to the day after the 4^th of July, our nation’s Independence Day, or any significant day.  In that essay I said this:

“Today is the day after Independence Day in the United States of America. I believe there are many people in this ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ who hold with me that freedom under law and being brave in the face of threats to our lives, our liberties or our sacred honor are values we should hold dear and strive to defend. We behaved like we believed it yesterday as we sang our great national anthems, listened to patriotic speeches, enjoyed the American flags and buntings, and were awed by the ‘rockets red glare’ where our communities didn’t have ordinances against our celebrations. The question is, will we behave like we believe it tomorrow and next week and next month?

“I therefore extend this challenge made on the 5th of July to the day after our national holiday, or Hanukah, or the day after Christmas or Easter, the day after Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, the day or week or month after any of our significant days of appreciation and remembrance: I challenge you to retain the kindled feelings of appreciation, of renewed determination, and of hope engendered, and live your life in pursuit of the noble ideals that these dates signify.”

I would like today, July 7, 2016 to elaborate briefly on that theme and to use Dwight D. Eisenhower, former U.S. Army general and 34^th president of the United States to illustrate another aspect of the principle of freedom. 

 

“Freedom,” President Eisenhower said in his 1957 State of the Union address, “has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline.”  He illustrated the principle himself on the day he decided to stop being a four-pack -a-day cigarette smoker.  Commenting on his decision to gain his freedom from this addiction and quit cold-turkey he said, “I simply gave myself an order.”  Eisenhower’s life, says David Brooks, “was fueled by passion and policed by self-control.”

Far too few people realize that the freedom to exercise one’s will to do what they want is also the freedom to exercise self-discipline that allows one to be free from the worst kinds of bondage—spiritual, emotional, and mental self-recrimination and the consequences of unbridled pursuit of physical pleasures or passions.  Personal freedom exercised properly is to cultivate a regulated character.  Put another way, it is better to bridle a horse so that it can be controlled and trained than to simply shoot the horse or incarcerate a man who doesn’t understand the restraints or constraints of freedom.   Sociologist Max Weber said that a moderate man aims to be passionate about his ends but deliberate about the proper means to realize them. 

 

If we are to let freedom ring across this land as once did our nation’s Liberty Bell, we must not hit it so hard that a crack develops so badly in our national character, as it did in the Liberty Bell, that it can no longer can it be rung.