POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

23Jul/1036

What Cost?

My father was a Sgt. Major in the United States Army, and because of that I lived in some not so boring places. For instance, when I was 7 we moved to Berlin, Germany. Which, in 1972 (yes..I'm that old), was 114 miles inside of East Germany and there was this:

The Berlin Wall

  A cold, gray, and for a 7 year old, scary monument to tyranny. It snaked through that city, dividing its citizens from each other, dividing families from each other. It was not designed or built to keep people out, but to keep them in. It was designed and built to force a population to submit to its government. A government not of their own choosing. It was designed and built to force a population to obey when its government decided who should live where, and have what job, and told them there was no God and forced them to abandon, at least publicly, those beliefs. It was the place where I, a tiny 7 year old girl, holding her soldier Daddy's hand, learned about freedom. It is the place, thousands of miles from the place of my birth in Augusta, Georgia, USA, where I learned what a privilege it is to be an American, where power is transferred without guns and tanks and the People, when the mood strikes them, can, without fear of government reprisals, speak out when they think it's being done wrong. It was the place where I learned that governments, given the opportunity either by circumstance or by the People, will run roughshod over those same people, taking from them whatever liberties and freedoms the People are not strong enough or vigilant enough to keep. It was the place where I learned that freedom isn't free and that once you have it, it is up to you to keep it. It is the place where I learned that it is in our very core, at the heart of what it is to be human, that we desire freedom. It is the place where I learned that when freedom has been stolen, humans will always fight to take it back, and they will always choose to die in that fight, rather than live as slaves.
What would you do, what would you give, what would you risk to be free? Free to choose your own path, your child's school, to choose to try and fail and then try again?
Would you attempt the things these women did:

Escape from East Berlin


 

Escape from East Berlin


  Or would you be willing to risk it all, and just run, full on for freedom, hoping to outrun the bullets?  

Peter Fechter, made it to the base of the wall before dying of multiple gunshot wounds.


 
Even the year the wall came down, people were dying to get across it. Across to the West Side. To the Free Side.
 

If he had just waited.....a few months.

That is where I learned I was free. It's where I learned what I would be willing to risk to stay that way.

Dede

Sometimes stuff rumbles around in my brain that's longer than 140 characters and, well......twitlonger just seems like cheating. :)

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30Aug/099

The “Reclamation” of Independance

jonathan-trumbull-signing-of-the-declaration-of-independence-large

“WHEN IN THE GENERATIONS  SUCCEEDING the one that pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to usher in the birth of the world’s only truly free nation, Liberty’s Progeny incrementally ceded their birthright to the government conceived and designed to serve a free people, and not be its servant, this generation is awakening to the terrible mistake that we, and our ancestors allowed to happen.  Charged with the terrible knowledge that comes with opened eyes, we now take up the long abdicated duty to rouse our fellow citizens and actively wrest the power and the liberties that have been progressively talked, cajoled, threatened, wheedled, and extorted from us, not only by those who ostensibly served us, but by their supporters and enablers who, by accident or design, saw fit to usurp and disdain such freedoms, that they might be withheld, and where impossible to withhold, might be condemned, until a corrosive contempt for these liberties, wrapped in velvet gloves, might so suffocate the circulation of them that this nation, conceived in liberty and the providence of a wise and benevolent creator, might indeed perish from the earth, plunging the rightful heirs of a proud and noble heritage in the the darkened waters of chaos, despair, and evil that surround them, a dank deluge that even today, other human beings actively seek to escape from in the inspiring embrace of this blessed and free country.

We, the awakened and aware, freely accept the charge that the architects of this republic passed on to us over two centuries before, in the hope that all who partook in the blessings made possible by nation they created would somberly undertake the duties of citizens, and so appropriately train themselves in virtue, and educate themselves in the workings of the precepts and ideals set forth in their foundational documents that they would possess enough wisdom to recognize that not all threats to our freedom would come from without our ranks, the knowledge to recognize that not every chain and shackle menacing us will immediately appear to be what it actually is, and the humilitynot to assume that the ingenuity and innovation that has been the hallmark of American success has been the product of man alone.

To this end, we hereby identify and reclaim our independence from the tools used to slowly enslave a free people and usurp the freedoms that we could not be persuaded to freely give up, or voluntarily suppress the free exercise of on our own…”

This is just the preamble of an amazing document I read over the weekend called, “The Reclamation of Independence”.  I saw linked to at a blog on POWIP’s blogroll, “The H2”.  I assure you that the entire document is just as inspiring, and puts forth, collected and  in neat order, many of the points that American conservatives and libertarians have been speaking about for many years.  Please take a moment to read the whole thing, and feel free to send it on in letter form to everyone you know, or post it on any blogs you may have access to; it is the authors intent that it go viral.  Just like many of the original liberty pamphlets published in the days leading up to the American revolution, this document needs to be distributed, read, and talked about far and wide…

What do you think?

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