QOD

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1. X Stryker says:

   June 7, 2008 at 9:09 am

   Thanks to the fight for freedom, Cobra has been defeated. The Joes never gave up; they were always there, fighting for freedom over land and in the air.

2. Brian says:

   June 7, 2008 at 5:36 pm

   Freedom- no easy definition, but I can tell you what it means to me.

   Freedom- to me- means the ability to know that between the external stimulus of my life which is not great and my response to it, I have the freedom to choose something different, I have the freedom to choose peace during war, to understand rather than be understood, and in all things to try my best to change myself and others for the better.

   I have the freedom to take responsibility for what I can, and to care for people I meet along the way the best I can. In some areas I need to be dependent, in some I am independent or interdependent, and I define freedom as the ability to look at things as they are objectivly as I can, and choose the course I want to take to try to make things better for myself and others. It is the quality of the choices we make that defines who we are and the scope of our freedom.

   That is why I also beleive in the values of mututal benefit that are considered disreputable when “I can get mine” over you. Temporal wins do not mean gains in freedom.

   Freedom is the scope to act inside yourself. It is not conditioned from the outside, but it is affected by others. For example, my freedom does not depend on my truck but my ability to get anywhere does. My freedom wants to go teach at a university, the big goose egg in my bank account and inability to find a job after illness restricts my liberty to do so.

   Liberty is the blessing of external economic, social and poltical conditions that allow and encourage one to have freedom to be both independent and interdependent. Without liberty the only real freedom you have is that freedom to respond to situations.

   Freedom mean nothing to a person who is starving, or a person who has no outlets for their potential. But Liberty does.

   With liberty the government and you protect your ability to be free and encourages outlets for the expression of your talents.

   These are the opposite of despotism which says you are determined from birth, from your ancestry from your current conditions to permantly stay a certain way and as a result to abuse you as part of ethnic, religious or social group.

   Whereas, freedom and liberty lead to peaceful relationships and a kind of harmony in society; despotism determines through social psychology and engineering the likes and dislikes of each group in advance and encourages unhealthy survival of the fittest beleifs.

3. Frieda Berryhill says:

   June 7, 2008 at 9:12 pm

   Having lived under the most despotic Government this world has seen, I can only say:
   HOW SWEET IT IS !

4. liz allen says:

   June 7, 2008 at 9:21 pm

   Freedom is putting back all those rights stolen with the vile Patriot Act. Freedom is having the right to free speech without worry of a FBI agent listening. Freedom is being free to speak your mind, without fear of recrimination. The USA is the last hope of real freedom. I believe that after Nixon, Reagun, GHBush, and Baby Bush we have less freedoms than our country ever has. We are on our way to fascism, on the order of what Frieda withstood as a young girl. McMad will take the imperial presidency put in place by Bush/Cheney and take it to the next step….the new world order!

5. Dana says:

   June 7, 2008 at 11:53 pm

   Freedom to me means that Liz Allen can post, in public, what she wrote above, without the least (reasonable) fear that the FBI will knock on her door.

6. Frieda Berryhill says:

   June 8, 2008 at 11:05 am

   Dana, not so fast. Liz is correct by stating that the Patriot Act is an unusual step toward control. of our people A friend of ours (Liz knows who it is) was visited by the FBI because of a telephone call she made to a local “call in” radio program. Which makes think, Geez, how many people and how much money does it take nationally to hunt down a mother of 4 to see if she is a terrorist.
   You should read the Act Dana. For me this was a dejavoo experience. The text seemed to be copied from the German Enabling Act of 1933.
   Look it up.

   Over 400 Cities, (4 in Delaware) and about 500 Organization and 8 States have shown their revulsion to this act that they felt compelled to pass a Anti-Patriot Act resolution, in essence declaring we will not comply.

7. TRUTH TELLER says:

   June 8, 2008 at 11:45 am

   We should all remember what Ben Franklin said about this subject.

   “Those who would give up some of their freedom for security will have neither.”

   It is sad to say that today some folks in this country are willing to do just that

8. Brian says:

   June 8, 2008 at 12:05 pm

   This is long DonV. Sorry.

   There has always been an inherent tension in American history between the impulse for power leading to excessive control and order and the impulse toward freedom and liberty leading to mutual benefit. It fluctates between time periods. Sigemund Frued thought it would either lead to anarchy or a social dictatorship of the business classes. We must not allow Frued to be proven correct.

   The important thing is that working together and making our country fulfill its God given potential to be the land of the free is a mission that we still have not acheived. We are a work in progress. Every person should know that. This is the historical mission of this nation. One needs only read William Penn and Madison and Tom Jefferson to see how this system of government was constituted and what it was constituted for- For the freedom of all, and for the protection of liberty. Those are the two corner stones of what makes America unique in the history of all the world and those are traditions I hope we maintain. In the end those are the things that the American experiment will be rembered for, if it fails to achieve those goals of fraternity, liberty and equality, and human freedom we need only blame ourselves becuase we did not listen to William Penn or were cowed by fear and power and self-loathing.

   I hope everyone out there takes time to read the life of William Penn and the Autobiogrpahy of Benjamin Franklin and say”this is my government.” When my relatives were with Penn working to establish this law, I have their diaries, one said, “the government of the people is an example of how people learn to govern through virtue for the benefit of each other” and this was added to by Voltaire who called our system under William and John Penn the “closest thing to a golden age that the earth has ever seen.” If we teach those principles and really beleive in them, then there is no chance of falling into the trap of swinging back and forth becuase we see that cooperation socially is as high a value as working together globally.

   Freedom and liberty are unalienable- no terrorist or enemy can take away from us. Even if the whole world rose up against this nation, not a single one could take a drink of the Mississippi, only we- said Abe Lincoln- can destroy ourselves through forgetting that cooperation, mutual benefit, freedom and liberty is the goal we set for ourselves and not raw competition. Lincoln saw the great danger posed by agression and competition first hand, and tried to reconcile this divided nation before his death. After his death, Walt Whitman was chronically depressed and said that “the struggle for this unity of purpose and national founding was harder than I had imagined.” So read Leaves of Grass too, it expresses our incredible diversity and the sheer idealistic joy that gives freedom and liberty meaning to the human heart.

   After reading these, all I can say is that they all advised against too much control, and I think if we want good government, we have to be good to one another. It is those simple traditional American values that will see us through whatever we face.