The altar of ‘freedom’
America is sick. It went on life support the day after Uvalde. This is not a sudden crisis; it’s been festering for decades. Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” has allowed its lights to slowly burn out. We are now a dim reflection of what we used to be when the concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was noble, worthy, and almost sacred—but always tempered within the bounds of common sense. They were such noble concepts that we were willing to go, and to send our sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers to foreign soils, shedding their life’s blood to protect those ideals here and abroad.
Now we’re too sick to take care of ourselves, much less protect the values that have made us the fabled city on the hill. Certainly, we send our sincerest “thoughts and prayers” to all the families whose children have had their heads blown away in repeating slaughterfests. Then we shrug our shoulders and convince ourselves that the price of freedom is worth the senseless slaughter now and then. We have let our thoughts and prayers become just another drug to numb the pain of our complacency.
If that was our only drug, perhaps we could summon the fortitude to overcome its addiction. Unfortunately that’s not the case. We are now an addicted nation succumbing to a myriad of poisons, both real and ephemeral. A numbing “fix” is always at our fingertips. In addition we have dumbed ourselves down to the point where we readily accept that misery, homelessness, poverty, murder and mayhem are simply part of freedom’s cost, as long as they happen to someone else. But you will never see the mother of a mutilated murdered child shrug her shoulders and proudly say that her baby’s life was just a payment to the cost of liberty. She can see. through the tears of her unthinkable suffering, that this notion is blatantly false.
You and I know that too. We are not dead yet and it’s up to us to do the things that must be done to initiate the healing process. If we can do that, then the children who’ve been sacrificed on the bloody altar of “freedom” will not have died in vain.
CHARLES McCULLOUGH Mammoth Spring