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December 16, 2008

Now is the Time for Choosing

 

 

Several of my friends posted this video on the web today, so I thought it would be good to share it here, as well.

 

 

There lie many challenges ahead for those of us who are Americans – indeed, in many respects perhaps more so for those of you who are not – but we have been gifted with the ability to deal with them. While the details of our challenges from century to century may change, the themes remain constant and inform us on how to proceed with the details. If this were not so, after all, men would not have need of philosophers or seek out or ever adhere to any principles of theory or ordinary daily practice.

 

This speech is my favorite among many by the Gipper, which is why I posted the text and the video on my blog a few years ago; I even made it the theme of this blog, as you can see by looking around. You can listen to the full speech, part one, part two, and part three by clicking these links. As a new Cold War dawns – and this time with two enemies Russia and China, along with the very hot war against their pawns in radical Islam, this speech should be heard and taken to heart now more than even when it was first delivered. I believe its thesis is the philosophical foundation upon which we should live our lives: we are made by God, we are endowed by Him with dignity and certain inalienable rights among men regardless of race, creed, civilized belief or government we were born under; therefore, each of us is called upon to protect those rights and that dignity which they enshrine.

 

We each have a duty to push ever outwardly against the stifling, morbidly constricting grip of darkness, which waits patiently like a predator for a moment of inattention and carelessness by its prey to make its final move. It needs only one generation of people who are apathetic of the danger lurking just out of sight – but never out of range of smell or common sense – to strike. While there are certainly those weaker among the herd that are unable to defend themselves and cannot be faulted for not detecting the danger, most should. Thus, to ignore danger through apathy is to commit an incomprehensible sin against the weaker among us or those yet to come, as well as against ourselves.

 

The first inhumanity then is not an act of repression or wanton violence; it is the act of apathy. Apathy is more than a choice, it is an act which must be repeated over and over each and every day and may be committed many more times by more people than the acts of cruelty which eventually they conceive and cause to be brought forth.  

 

 Though men may forget this, they forget this at their own great peril. And, while it is unfortunate that it takes acts of inhumanity to remind us of our humanity, at least in this we can find comfort that we have in the past, at least, found our way back regardless of whether we found ourselves there at no fault of our own. Nevertheless, lest the inhumanity become our own, we have an obligation to protect our fellow man – beginning with those immediately around us and regardless of whether we presently find ourselves enslaved or free – and the coming generations from the cruel indignity that is worse than death: that perverted bondage under the heavy chains of political repression that is so contrary to goodness and justice and the very natural order of things. Along with that cruel indignity also comes as insult to the injury, as countless people enslaved have learned, are slavery’s  regularly manifest sisters prolonged poverty, agonizing separations from those beloved around us, and cruel death.

 

We see the fruit of apathy in every soul who cowers where he sleeps, whimpering in the night; who has lost or fears for his family and dreads each day more than the last not because he does not have enough food to eat, though he likely ultimately will not, but because his government is wicked, violent, capricious, and cruel, his rights to speak out against it, to assemble with others to oppose it or to possess weapons to defend themselves or to resist it are not recognized, as are his rights to be free from inhumane and causeless violations of his person and property. He now feels he has no way to reverse it, and indeed, the way for him is hard indeed. Thus, we cannot on our watch permit those we could have saved to be forced to wake up in such fear and terror and hopeless misery knowing full well what it is they will suffer and we presently fight against.

 

All good men must do as freedom fighters do and they must not set aside that mantle; for to do so is to deny that they are human, and to deny that their children and their children’s children are human. And it is also to deny all of what is true about Creation, that there are stars and planets around us, along with trees and rivers and all forms of living things. Freedom is, as has been put before, a law of nature; its systemic denial not merely a cruel perversion, but a threat and danger to all things material and spiritual. Thus we faintly grasp the outline then of the full extent of evil, but also of what it is to do good. To love your neighbor as yourself is not an ephemeral and ethereal exercise but a call for proactive and learned toil and progress against the night; work which is never complete, but whose each stage offers a bright reward both eternal and temporal. So let us do what is good so that evil will not triumph.

 

 

 

 

"Our hope, our prayer, remains the same as that heard on the lips of so many millions ... that someday freedom will light the world and become the blessing and birthright of every people, everywhere."  – From President Reagan's last official news conference on 8 December, 1988. That was just a little over a week ago 20 years ago today; yet, the truth eternal long preceded him and will long outlive his time among us on this earth.  

 

 

Posted by Martin at December 16, 2008 03:51 PM

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