The meaning of freedom for which so many died defending it

Heavily edited, reduced version appeared in the editions of the Sky Hi News, May 31, 2017.

So how are you celebrating Memorial Day? Will it be a long weekend  with friends and families and backyard barbecues? Or did you put up your flag  with a sense that you did your patriotic duty? Or have you reflected a bit  on the meaning of Memorial Day,  to commemorate those who died in defense of our country? I plan all.  Running through my head  is Lee Greenwood’s great lyric which  captures the meaning of Memorial Day the best:

“And I'm proud to be an American

Where at least I know I'm free

And I won't forget the ones who died who gave that right to me

And I'll gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today

Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land, God Bless the USA.”

Those words are ones that both sides of the ideological spectrum can agree upon.  However, in our polarized America, we have differing views of what freedom, the  core value saluted in those lyrics, means.

My grandson, raised in a Colorado household of both  immigrants  and  those who could trace New World ancestors back to the late 1600’s, just returned from a visit with relatives of his nearest and dearest in a southern state.  His comment was, “they live in a different world and now I understand why Donald Trump is popular there”.  To him  profound  political divisions became real.

I  was not surprised. I grew up in Oklahoma, the reddest of any state, but I spent the remainder  of my life in large urban areas both in Europe and in the US and  married  a refugee from eastern Europe.  I have experienced  authoritarianism and  non-free societies  practiced first hand. Not everyone has that perspective, but it has influenced my political thought about what freedom means and what I find disturbing today in this very politically polarized America.

While I respect others’ rights to hold values that differ even from what  I was taught in my  Oklahoma youth,   I see personal freedom as protected  in our Constitution’s  First Amendment : right to free speech, press freedom, religious freedom, and the freedom to peacefully assemble. I see those freedoms under attack  today by some. For them,  free speech is reserved for those who  agree with personal views, but otherwise those opinions are to be minimized, shouted down and physically intimidated. Religious freedom is not only free from government interference to practice it  or to be free of a  religion established, preferred, or enforced by a government,   but now  it  means to some freedom to refuse to serve or give the same rights to those  with different religious beliefs and values.   Freedom of the press means loyalty to one media outlet and to consider all others prejudicial  and “the enemy of the people”  regardless of the merits of the arguments or the sources of  facts. Facts become those presented by the favored news outlet; otherwise there are no such things as facts.  The freedom to assemble in peaceful protest is viewed as motivated and organized  by some sinister force to be disrespected as certainly not arising  from real self interest or values of morality and a sense of fairness.  Our military  defends our freedoms from foreign threats, but the real threat  to our traditional views of freedom lies  within our own country’s hearts and minds.