By Jim Dickson
I recently attended an event that featured a very interesting speaker who had some thoughts on what we should be thankful for this holiday season. Something the speaker said really hit home with me. He said, ”After life itself, freedom is possibly our greatest gift of all.”
Until that moment I never really thought of freedom as a gift, it’s just something that I have always had, something that I took for granted because I born a citizen of the United States. For most of us, it truly is a gift, because we have done nothing to earn it. We have paid no price, we have made no sacrifice, it was simply given to us by those who did pay the price.
This precious gift that is given to us at no charge is routinely denied to millions of people around the world. The United States is one of the few places where the right to freedom is guaranteed in writing. Our Bill of Rights guarantees several fundamental human rights. Unfortunately these rights are always under attack by the radical left. They believe that the needs of the state should take precedence over individual rights and freedom.
When I see what is happening on college campuses around the country, where mobs of students are attempting to cancel free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, and recently anti-antisemitism. I can’t help but think what would happen to those same students if they lived in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela or any other of communist dictatorships with which they seem so enamored. I am pretty sure that they would end up in jail or worse.
They have the freedom to speak out and protest only because they live in a nation that they deem to be evil. It is a gift that they don’t even know they were given. Russia recently passed a law that if you are critical of the government or the war in Ukraine you can be arrested and sentenced to up to 15 years in prison. Is that what they would like to see here?
No one should ever be denied the right of peaceful protest, or to say what they believe. The thing that distresses me most is that these young people do seem to believe in what they are doing and saying is right. The only conclusion that I can draw is that they are being taught to forgo freedom and embrace socialism.
The Wall Street Journal reported that according to a 2022 Pew Research poll that nearly half of 18 to 29 year olds favor socialism over a market economy. I think it was Vladimir Lenin who said “The goal of socialism is communism.” They seem to want the socialist state in spite of the fact that it’s a free-market economy that is allowing them to spend upward to $70,000 a year to attend colleges like Yale and Harvard.
There is something very wrong with this picture and it doesn’t bode well for the future of the United States if these people are ever in charge of government or business. We can only hope that they have an epiphany before that happens.Sometimes reality leads to truth.
Fortunately it seems that the nation is beginning to wake up to what has been going on in American schools for the past several decades. Parents are starting to take an interest in what their children are being taught and are speaking out against the Woke and socialist agenda. It is becoming a political issue that is high on the list of what people want changed by elected officials around the country. It’s an issue that cuts across political, racial, and economic lines.
Let’s hope that it is not too late to change the direction and the drift toward the loss of our most precious gift, freedom, to the evil of the collective state.
Born, raised and educated in the Southwest, Jim Dickson served in the U.S. Navy Reserve in Vietnam before a 35-year business career. Retired to St. Helena Island, Dickson and his wife are fiscally conservative, socially moderate and active in Republican politics, though they may not always agree with Republicans. Having lived around the country and traveled around the world, Dickson believes that the United States truly is the land of opportunity.
