Clarence Darrow: - You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

I’m glancing at the news on the protests in Iran and all that is going on over there. It’s heartbreaking to see so many millions crying out for freedom and then to be mercilessly squashed by an out of control theocracy.
Freedom!
Remember the end of Braveheart when William Wallace is getting gutted, being forced to recant for his treachery to the English crown. There is this slight moment he hesitates, the crowd and the torturer lean in and then with the last of his breath he screams out Freedom!!!!

Sometimes I think we as Americans take it for granted.

Not in the way you might think.

Not in the “Oh i’m so rich and spoiled that I don’t understand what freedom is!” that some people use as a cudgel to make us feel guilty for what we have, or our place in the world.
I actually think it’s opposite of that. I think we understand it far better than anyone in history has ever actually understood it. We bleed freedom, we breathe it, it’s part of our American DNA.
Let me splain.
I remember reading “1984″ by Orwell and “Night” by Wiesel and finding myself really pissed off. Not at the Nazi’s, not at the thought police, we knew they were evil.  But I found myself more annoyed at the people that rolled over and let these people get away with this crap.
Maybe it was seeing an assortment of Heroes on the big screen fight against all odds for their freedom. Or maybe it was the comic books I read saying that justice and freedom are what matters at all costs.

But I think that is just the sum of 200 years of living with freedom, fighting for it, and wanting it for everyone on planet earth.

Freedom is in our blood. We breath it and live it, I think that’s why I got so mad.
A couple hundred years ago there were some chaps that were sick of being taxed as much as they were. They were sick of not being able to make their own future, of being burdened by a monarchy that sent ships to take the goods and services from these former foreigners who had risked their life to come to a new land for their own. They were sick that what they believed, what they thought, what they did was constrained by someone else…
So America was born, on the blood of people that thought they new better than a centralized power. A people that had the whole world ahead of them and could not be constrained.
The product of that has been something that I think at our core we can’t shake. We have lived so long being free, anything else incites anger, and potentially violence (thus the 2nd amendment argument comes into play).

So i stare at the news of Iran and I think of when our Founders took up arms to cut the noose from those that would determine our future for us, and hope that Iran can do the same. I also pray that our government will get out the message that we support the free people of Iran. That we support the free people anywhere and it is high time in this age that all people everywhere are free..to vote, to choose, to worship.
That’s America’s calling in this world. To help those that are not free become free themselves. Even when we fail, we are honored to have tried. Vietnam, Korea, WW2, and even Iraq, they are all intrinsically (though the conspirators might say differently) about freedom from tyranny.
Makes me pumped for what we have, what we are, and how we came to be. I hope that our friends across the way do whatever they can to get that too.

God Bless Free Iran.