Whether we like to admit it or not, most of us crave freedom from the responsibilities of our lives. Freedom from having to pay the bills, from working all day, from making dinner, and from the silent restraints we put on ourselves to be respectable members of our communities.
Progressives in this country believe not only that such responsibilities make them unfree, but make them oppressed. Those who embrace organizations like Black Lives Matter—which, according to its website, “disrupt[s] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement”—believe motherhood is a burden imposed on women by tyrannical husbands. They believe gender is the imprisonment of true individual expression by an intolerant society and that America’s police forces are agents of racism, Hell-bent on keeping people—mainly black people—in their place. They subsequently support abortion on demand, the abolition of police forces, and the perverted goals of the LGBT movement.
These progressives believe that freedom from all restraints is true freedom and should be the highest aspiration of American society.
This, however, is the freedom an astronaut would feel were he to remove his suit in the vacuum of space floating freely towards the certainty of death.
Most on the left may not even realize it, but the freedom they pursue is the freedom of suicide. Progressives push to free us not from undue burdens, but from the very necessary burdens of human existence. Yes, motherhood is hard, but it’s a role more important than that of President of the United States. A man may be uncomfortable in his body, but it is his body and he has no choice. Some people might feel threatened by the police, but without police, all people would be threatened by criminals.
A man is defined not by his liberty, but by his burdens. A camel, as GK Chesterton notes, free from his hump is not a freer camel, but free from being a camel.
If the American people continue to embrace this progressive trend, they will find themselves increasingly miserable and unfulfilled. We will fail to see that our full potential is realized when we live up to our responsibilities and squandered when we live only for ourselves.
Americans must accept that true freedom lies, not in the ability to do whatever we want, but in being allowed to do what we ought.
When a man is free from everything, he has nothing.