Responsibility and Freedom
Photo Credit: TownHall By Jackie Gingrich Cushman.
We declared our independence from Great Britain 238 years ago this week. It was a declaration long in coming, brought about by the overreaching rule of King George III and Britain’s insistence on taxation without representation.
The taxation began in the 1760s, the Boston Massacre occurred in 1770, the Boston Tea Party in 1993 and the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775.
Patrick Henry’s call to action, “Give me liberty or give me death,” was the first strong public statement that, if we were to be free, if we were to have liberty, then we would have to fight Britain. Prior to Henry’s speech to the gathering of Virginia delegates in Richmond, the prevailing belief was that we could negotiate with Britain.
Henry laid down the gauntlet and clearly presented his understanding of what we were facing.
Our choice was liberty or death.
Read more from this story HERE.
___________________________________________________________________________
Photo Credit: Andy Carpenean / Laramie Boomerang / APLand of the free? Not so much. Americans’ sense of freedom drops, poll finds.
By Gram Slattery.
This Independence Day, Americans will celebrate the nation’s core values, especially freedom. But according to a new international poll, Americans have become significantly “less satisfied with the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives.”
Seventy-nine percent of US residents are satisfied with their level of freedom, down from 91 percent in 2006, according to the Gallup survey, released Tuesday.
That 12-point drop pushes the United States from among the highest in the world in terms of perceived freedom to 36th place, outside the top quartile of the 120 countries sampled, trailing Paraguay, Rwanda, and the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Read more from this story HERE.