Freedom: Priceless

What is the value of freedom? Is it like a shirt that you see on a clothes rack and, seeing the price tag, you put it back, looking for a less expensive shirt? While you may make do with a less expensive shirt, can you make do without your freedom or with lesser freedom or none at all? If freedom is too expensive, is it better to live in slavery?

Our fore fathers understood that people in all situations put up with much in order to maintain what little comfort that they have:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Does the value of freedom go up and down depending on who’s freedom is in question? Is the freedom of one person more valuable than the freedom of his neighbor? If you were free and your neighbor was not, would you pay the same price for his freedom as you paid for your own? If you were told that your freedom would cost you $100 and your neighbor $500, would his freedom be too expensive? If it cost you no money, but you had the key to your neighbors prison, would you risk your life to give him that key or would you place it somewhere near by and tell him that, if he can figure out how to retrieve that key from his prison cell, he can have it, the cost little or nothing to you?

What if you decided that you would risk your life for his freedom and, in the course of doing so, you died? Was his freedom too expensive? Was the value of his freedom diminished by the price of your blood or did it increase knowing what it cost? If three men gave their lives for one man to be free, is his freedom now diminished by their cost or increased?

What if it wasn’t your neighbor, but was you mother, father, sister, brother, wife and/or children? Does the value of their freedom increase with the proximity of their relation to you? Would you give more for their freedom than the man down the street, across the border or an ocean?

If we apply diminishing value based on proximity and relation, then what value is our own freedom to a man on the other side of the street, much less on the other side of the ocean?

They say that freedom isn’t free. I assert here that neither is it free nor can a value be placed upon it. It cannot be measured by money, possessions or even the amount of blood that is spilled to attain it. If we place a value on it based on any of these things, what then is the value of our own freedom? If we place a limit on the value of our own freedom or on another man’s, then we have declared a price that will surely sell that freedom cheaply.

They tell you that 2000 men and women have died in Iraq. They call it a “grim milestone”. Others have set up protests, pretending to mourn, yet seemingly counting the dead gleefully as if they were misers counting their gold in the window while men walk by in chains.

You may ask, what is the value of each man or woman who sacrificed his or her life? No value can be set because their lives were priceless. They had a value that no accounting method could ascertain. That value was increased by every generation that came before them that lived free or fought for and died for freedom, whether that freedom was their own or a man across the ocean. Whoever should die in that cause, from the first to the last, increases the value of freedom more than ever could be counted.

Do not be fooled by false accounting. Today, we walk free. We walk free because millions have given their lives over 200 years to buy it and keep it. Who among us would say that the cost was too high?

But, they say, this was not a war of liberation, but a war of aggression. By who’s accounting? The freeman walking in the street with an anti-war protest sign or the free woman casting her ballot for the second time in the place that was liberated?

Not only is the value of our freedom increased with the death of every freeman, it is increased again with every man that walks free. Tomorrow, 2001 men and women will have died to provide security to the free citizens of the United States and give freedom to 25million people, 9000 miles away. The value of their freedom will have increased by one more priceless life and the value of our freedom will have increased by 25 million.

Tomorrow, people will still be counting the dead. They will tell you that the price of freedom is too high when that cost is our best and bravest, especially if it is the freedom of a brown skinned man 9000 miles away.

I will tell you when the last man, woman and child are free and we count the dead, we will not say that the cost was too much.

I will tell you that freedom isn’t free; it’s priceless.