Freedom To Live

Photo by Jessica Tan on Unsplash

We are denied the most fundamental freedoms. But we won’t just ask for them. We will take them.

We are not free as long as we are compelled to work all or nearly all of our lives serving a cruel selfish elite, making them richer—and wasting our own lives on their behalf.

In his now largely forgotten FOUR FREEDOMS speech, President Franklin Roosevelt described what real freedom means—and pledged to bring freedom to our country, while smashing Nazis.

Today, of course, America is governed by Nazis, a regime that is busy reducing the American people to a state of fear and desperation. We will not go along with this, but this is what is being attempted by fools and thugs.

FDR’s Four Freedoms

On January 6, 1941 (yes, January 6th!)—before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into WWII, President Roosevelt gave his annual State of the Union speech.

One memorable statement from this speech—that’s still relevant today:

“Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

He then outlined the Four Freedoms:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech, and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium.

It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

What’s striking about the current administration is its commitment to crushing any semblance of the four freedoms, to the modest degree that they even exist.

The administration kidnaps, imprisons—without due process or any basic protections whatsoever—deports, and sometimes physically brutalizes people who criticize the administration or support any policies or behaviors that the regime opposes. These are violations of freedom of speech AND freedom from fear. Albeit, in this case it’s fear of the domestic enemy of a hostile government.

Freedom of worship is under attack as the administration seeks to establish Christianity as the state religion. But we aren’t talking about the Christianity of Jesus Christ—which the administration wholly rejects. This government is in the most literal sense, the anti-Christ.

As anyone can see, this regime does not believe in loving one another, loving one’s enemies, being kind to strangers and foreigners, and turning the other cheek. In fact, this administration is committed to the exact opposite of what Jesus preached.

Instead, this administration worships Mammon and demands that we all worship a fatted orange calf.

Perhaps the most visible and dramatic crime of the regime is its sudden and severe attempt to maximize deprivation—that is, to reduce the people of our country to poverty and desperation. The plutocrats and oligarchs want a pacified citizenry, ready to obey and serve the thuggish rulers.

Of course, since we are Americans committed to the unfulfilled promise of freedom, we will never be pacified and will never comply.

Freedom From Want—Our Earned Freedom

Rulers do not produce anything. They take from us. They take everything and reluctantly feed us crumbs.

This isn’t true only in the United States. Or even under only the present administration. The current regime is extraordinarily brutal and cruel, but our system has been corrupted by the wealthy for quite some time.

We see it everywhere. Billionaires and their soulless corporations raping the planet and enslaving hundreds of millions of people, requiring us to do their evil bidding.

And while we have been serving them for some time—virtually imprisoned inside of office buildings and factories (and now, even in our own homes)—the level of cruelty is being sharply turned up. The rationale for this cruelty and greed is more thinly disguised, and provides little cover.

We are moving from fake ideology to justify cruelty and greed and on to undisguised, overt and violent tyranny. Some are too slow to see this, but tens of millions in America DO see it, and hundreds of millions worldwide are fully aware of what is happening.

We will stop the tyranny and brutality and disempower our oppressors. We will disarm them. We can do this because we ourselves have, up to this point, been their weapons. We have, on their behalf, been oppressing ourselves.

We do not need to seize power because we have been the power all along. What we will do is re-direct our power and exercise it on behalf of human dignity and ecological sanity—and no longer serve the elites.

This is nonviolent noncooperation. This is the strategy that works. This is how People Power has always dethroned kings and dictators, humbled empires, and reversed outrages against human rights.

Kings, tyrants and even stupid cruel ideology have no power except our obedience. And when we refuse to obey, they are done. This is true, has always been true, and the evil elites worldwide are depending on us to neither remember nor act on this vital truth.

But we will act. Instead of wasting our lives, destroying the planet and dooming our children, we will produce what humans need and share these things freely and establish “freedom from want” everywhere on Earth.