Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Happy Birthday America!!!!

The country I dearly love, the greatest country in the history of the world, the beacon of freedom, the only country in the world people will risk their lives braving vast oceans on rickety, makeshift boats to get to.

The chance at a better life, the chance to experience freedom as FDR sums it up in his "Four Freedoms" speech which I'll excerpt here for you:

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look
forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression
-- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his
own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world
terms, means economic understandings which will secure to
every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants
-- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into
world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments
to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation
will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression
against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite
basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and
generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of
the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators
seek to create with the crash of a bomb.


- Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
excerpted from the Annual Message to the Congress,
January 6, 1941

Please my friends, remember why we celebrate today.
Please remember those who are in harm's way right now and those who served and suffered to give us one more freedom which is more prevalent today, the freedom not to care.



No comments: