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That's very true if you live in France. Or Britain. Or the Phillippines.
The men, women and children of those nations and many more have given their lives again and again through history to purchase the freedoms their descendants enjoy to greater or lesser degrees today.
But do not try to sell me the bill of goods that a single drop of American blood has been shed in defense of this country since the last man fell in 1783. This country has gone to war around the world and even within its own borders, and never once has it done so in its own defense.
We have paid the price for freedom for many people around the world, and in some cases the cost was justified. We have also carelessly thrown away the lives of thousands of young men more than once not to earn anyone's freedom but to satisfy bloodthirsty public opinion, to entertain half-baked notions of empire, and to engage in unwinnable real-life chess battles with political adversaries. More than one million Americans have died in the course of our wars from 1775 to this very day, fighting for almost every imaginable cause except one -- American freedom.
It is worth asking why this is the case, and I have a simple answer. Our Constitution. The system of goverment and the protection of freedoms it afforded created an internal mechanism that required no ongoing need for the imposition of power by the government. Protected by the advantages of natural geography for most of our history, we did not need to fend off rivals or petty political maneuverings, and so our system had the opportunity to invest itself deeply in institutional and popular sentiment. Freedom that does not need to be defended from within is unassailable from without.
We are now faced with a critical juncture in our history where the undermining of freedom from within grows at an alarming pace. The present administration has seen fit to simply ignore any law it dislikes, and now we are told that the Vice President employs a man specifically for the purpose of vetting all legislation, rewriting anything that interferes with the extension of executive power, discarding legislation outright when it does not suit their aims, and developing an agenda of political power that puts the self-righting ability of our tri-partite government at risk.
To distract us, the administration has sent 2,400 more men and women to their deaths, cloaked in the lie of "defending freedom". Today we are expected to honor them along with the one million plus who have fallen.
Honor them we should. They have willingly and often heroically sacrificed themselves, as did the thousands upon thousands before. They performed their duties with loyalty and dedication. There can be no discounting the performance of these people, and they deserve our utmost respect. But they also deserve an honest recognition for the reasons their sacrifices were made, and while time has seen to it that no final accounting can be made for the mistakes of the past, we owe it to them to bring to justice those who misuse them and seek to weaken what they stand to protect.
Amen, brother.
Posted by shelley [URL] at 05/29/06
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