What do we really have here?

People talk about rights and freedom and liberty that we have in the U.S.  What are those things really and do we really have them?  Did we ever?  Will we have them later?

First of all, "Freedom" gets talked about a lot.  At it's core, what is the freedom that we refer to in America?  It's being your own person.  no one owns you.  You are not a slave in terms of being viewed as being the property of someone else.

There are no more paupers prisons, indentured servants or outright slaves anymore. Yet major banks and creditors have frequently been referred to as holding people in positions of near servitude as their debts with alarmingly high interest rates hold many to a life of working to pay those credit cards bills or lose everything.

While technically not servitude or slavery,  I can see how many find creditors situations as being nearly the same.  Banks are noted in newspapers and tv news all the time for fraudulent banking practices, unfair interest rates and outright swindling of loan holders.

No, technically, we are still a "free" people.  We are not the property of anyone else.  yet.

What about Liberty?  Do we have liberty in this country?  Liberty is the position of being that no person, government, religious or other group  can dictate to a person their terms of living.

Government cannot force you to take up a specific career or job.  A church cannot force you to join a sect or perform specific tasks.

To have true liberty here, you are your own person.  You decide how to live your life and you are responsible for the results of your actions and decisions.

True liberty in America is eroding.  The government is increasingly putting pressure on people to give up or allow to be infringed Constitutional rights in the name of safety and security.  They are always working to save people from themselves. 

In order to provide people a gilded cage though, the people have to be willingly locked into that gilded cage.  People are being cajoled and coerced and frightened into thinking that they can only be safe or secure if they allow the government to take on the personal responsibilities they should be maintaining themselves.

What about the rights that are so called "guaranteed" to us by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights?  All three factions of the U.S. government are collaborating to weaken and eventually remove those rights that are supposedly ours as recognized as given to us by our creator.

By recognizing that the Creator of all things endowed us with these rights, then it is understood that no man or government of man has the authority to deny those rights to other people.  That's the idea, that we are all equals and cannot deny that which was given to us by that higher power.  it's meant to keep us humble and to respect and appreciate what we have.

A ruling class has been evolving over the past decades that allow the supposedly elected representatives to live by a different set of rules than the rest of the people though.  They want to differentiate between people and assume that those in government and with enough money have a different set of rules to live by than everyone else.

We are losing our rights because people are arguing that they are not rights endowed by a Creator to all of us.  More and more will try to convince people that there is no Creator at all and there is only people.  That only some of the people "deserve" to be in the ruling elite class while the others do not.

We are a country that is losing it's faith and by so losing our faith in the Creator, we are devolving to class-ism and a different form of "Divine Right".  not the "Divine Right" that leads misguided people to think they can rule over others because they are a chosen of God but that they should rule over others because of evolution.  They believe they are born more advanced and more evolved than the majority of others.

We have a population that has not had to earn their citizenship status, but has inherited over many generations.  They have grown to think of themselves as entitled to certain benefits without the requite personal responsibility or provenance that comes with showing why one wants to be a citizen.

A country where we have true Liberty, true Freedom and retain those Rights as originally intended requires us to be vigilant, to take responsibility for ourselves, To accept that this life comes with accepting the risks as well as the rewards.

There has always been a saying that we will lose this country not because another country took it, but because we will give it up.

Sadly,  I think that day is coming if people's thinking does not change soon.