Without Liberty We Might As Well Be Dead

By Ron Ewart
October 29, 2014
NewsWithViews.com

[This is a revision to an article we wrote in October 2008]

PROLOGUE: In less than a week Americans who care about their freedom will be faced with one of the most important choices they will ever make since the American Revolution. If you sit out this election, the other side will win. If you vote for a third party candidate, the other side will win. If you write in a candidate, the other side will win. Conservatives are by no means perfect and are at best, the lesser of two evils. But at least they generally believe in the founding principles of freedom. Conservatives believe in individual, unalienable rights as the gift from their creator. The other side believes in the collective and the absolute rule of the majority ….. the mob. The following story will give you an idea where America is headed, unless conservatives like you come out en masse on November 4th and relegate the other side to obscurity.

“In the shackle room of the jailhouse, the jailer snaps the handcuffs around your wrists and attaches them to the chain around your waste. You tremble in anticipation of what comes next. The jailer then reaches for the leg irons, and one by one, closes them tightly around your ankles. Your anxiety rises even further. All through this process, you keep telling the jailer that you are innocent. Paying no attention to your pleadings, the jailer impersonally grabs you by the arm and pulls you out the door. You struggle to walk because the chain connecting the leg irons is very short, forcing you to shuffle. The people in the hallway and on the walkway outside stare at you with disdain in their eyes, but you can’t see the dread in their hearts. Paralyzing fear grips you as you approach the steps to the gallows. You balk at the bottom of the stairs but the jailer pulls on you harder, making you stumble up the stairs.”

“At the top of the stairs, the jailer walks you over to a trap door and tells you to stand there. He pulls a black hood over your head and then roughly places the thick hangman’s noose around your neck and pulls it tight. You are now blind and more than just afraid. You are terrified. Each beat of your rapidly-beating heart reverberates in your head like a loud drum. You contemplate your last few minutes on Earth and visions of your whole life parade in a kaleidoscope of images in your mind. In pure anguish, you think of what will happen to your wife and kids when you are gone. You let out a soft moan at the thought.”

“How is it you find yourself in this situation, when all you had done was to speak out against the government? How did a once-free society find itself in a police state where every single unalienable right had been stripped from the people, one Amendment at a time? What happened to freedom, liberty and justice, the pursuit of happiness and the promise of our sacred Constitution? Was this Cuba or Red China? You say to yourself, ‘….. what happened to my individual rights? Why didn’t someone fight for them?’”

“As you finally accept your fate, you flinch as the jailer whispers something in your ear through the hood, but you can’t believe what he is saying. He said he had been given the authority to grant clemency and that all I would have to do to be saved from the gallows was to denounce freedom and liberty. Nevertheless, I would still have to wear the handcuffs and leg irons whenever I was outside my cell, for the rest of my life. Knowing full well what the consequences of my next act would be, I rose up tall, took a deep breath and through the hood, told the jailer that without liberty, I might as well be dead. And then I said, in almost a scream, “Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death.”

“To my utter surprise, the crowd around the gallows, who, in the beginning, looked on me with disgust, started to repeat my statement, chanting it over and over again. And each time their voices grew louder and louder. In an act of pure solidarity, somehow triggered by what I said, they rushed the gallows, tore the guns from the guards and stopped the jailer as he was reaching for the lever that would open the trap door. I had been saved. I had been saved by an idea. I had been saved by a concept that is as old as civilization itself. I had been saved by the irresistible siren call of freedom.”

“A few in the crowd removed the noose around my neck, lifted the hood off my head and then unlocked my shackles and chains. They led me down off the gallows platform and lifted me up on their shoulders like a hero and marched me through the streets, as a sign of protest to the authorities. I was free at last and free because I took a stand against tyranny, even though it could have meant my death. The people who witnessed this injustice finally realized that they would also have to take a stand to protect their own freedom, if liberty was to prevail for each of them and future generations.”

Yes, of course, the foregoing was fiction but don’t think it can’t happen in America. The story illustrates what can happen in a country when the leaders are free to do anything they want to do, because the people refused to hold the leaders accountable.

But most people, faced with the choice of slavery or freedom, will eventually seek freedom. Americans tore themselves away from the tyranny of England, at great cost. From that conflict arose the most powerful nation on Earth, conceived in liberty; a nation built on the recognition of the inviolate natural rights of man, but an idea that has been left to rust in the history books……. for now.

If there were only a way for the cry, “Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death” to infect every man, woman and child in America and get them to rise up and storm the “gallows of politics and politicians” and tear that “gallows” down with the same vigor and determination that President Reagan told Russia’s Gorbechev to “Tear Down This Wall.” And this they must do before no man is safe from persecution for speaking out against a government, a government that is Hell bent on the systematic destruction of a free society.

If comfort and security are more important than freedom and liberty, then we give our consent to be enslaved. If being entertained is more important than taking an active interest in what our leaders have done and are doing, we deserve whatever those leaders inflict upon us. Should we turn our heads away from our duty to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States and the freedom and liberty it guarantees, we perpetrate a grave injustice on ourselves and on our children and grandchildren.

Read more at NWV’s:

http://newswithviews.com/Ewart/ron176.htm