Published July 1, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
“What are we doing permitting fireworks in this drought year? It’s so dry...” said a woman in the back of
the Lindsay city council chambers on June 9th.
She didn’t speak up, so no one officially heard or answered, and so our
freedom to sell and buy fireworks was approved once again. But that freedom is not one of the basic
four.
The four freedoms are worth thinking about during this Independence Day
week. First enunciated by President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in January of 1941 prior to our entry into World War
II, the four freedoms rang like liberty bells through the hallways of Congress
and our homes that entire decade.
Speaking them brought tears to people’s eyes and stirred hearts as much
as the raising of the flag. Normal
Rockwell captured them beautifully in four paintings; Dorothea Lange did the
same in photographs. Yet we hardly ever
hear of them now. I had to look them up
to get them right.
The four freedoms are delicately
balanced like points on a compass. Two -
the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion - are guaranteed in our
constitution (or at least, the right to exercise them is.) The other two - the freedom from fear and the
freedom from want - come from a dream, the dream of equality that dreamed
Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as many others. The dream of World War II was that, in
defeating the tyrants on the opposite sides of each ocean surrounding us, we
would make the world safe for democracy.
Then all people would have not only the rights to speak and to pray but
also the rights to a roof over their heads, food on the table, and (since
everyone had the basic necessities,) to live with no wolf at the door.
Seven decades after that war’s conclusion,
it would be hard to argue that we won.
We may have won the majority of the battles, the deciding victories,
defeated the German and Japanese tyrants and squelched their allies. But in many places around the globe, speech
and prayer are still dictated, while fear and want run rampant. Voting in elections still can get you killed,
as can obtaining a loaf of bread or falling asleep in the wrong place.
I think our Independence rating is
fairly questionable even here. I
regularly encourage people to exercise their freedom of speech at city council
meetings, but few take me up on the offer, pleading one kind of fear or
another. There are countless Christian
churches in which to pray and tithe, but if your faith is Muslim, you might
think twice before attending in some states.
A large percentage of this country’s children suffer from hunger: hunger for food and hunger for nurturance,
while most of the rest suffer from wanting, born with the consumer virus. And how many people do you know who are free
from fear?
It strikes me that there could be a
relationship between the two sets of freedoms.
Perhaps the freedoms from fear and want grow dim as we forget to
exercise the freedoms of speech and religion.
Perhaps the dream goes into a nosedive as we forget who we are as
Americans and people of God. Perhaps
there is no freedom from fear or want when we abdicate the civic auditoriums
and faithful pews, when we hear no words crying for equality from the podiums and
pulpits. Perhaps there’s a relationship,
a delicate balance like the four points of the compass.
Think about your freedoms as you
light off your fireworks and light up your barbeques this weekend.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy
Wischemann is a patriotic writer in Lindsay.
You can send her your list of freedom-generating ideas c/o P.O. Box
1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave
a comment below.
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