The blessings of liberty

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin

It is when I am furthest from home that I tend to appreciate America the most.

Not that every place I visit or live doesn't have its unique and intrinsic charms; but never do I regret winning the birth lottery of natural-born American citizenship. Developing countries tend to exude early-American entrepreneurship and eager, heartfelt service, but run terribly arid on all the splendid little conveniences we grow accustomed to enjoying. Other first-world countries drip with those niceties like drinkable water and flushable toilets and driveable roads, but whirr with a cold efficiency, demonstrating little of the creativity or joie de vivre, the multiculturalism, the daring, the refusal to be confined or defined, the irrepressable variety of our melting-pot society. And you cannot seem to escape castes and class systems, more deeply ingrained than even the color line in America, that deep divide that today seems so joyously to be vanishing, ever so slowly, filled in by the endless toil and shoveling of an endless line of heroic laborers.

Here, in Singapore, you emerge into a most modern, economically successful, clean, superbly-equipped, crime-free, and indeed beautiful city, but its residents flit through the well-swept streets like so many timid ghosts, afraid to even breathe the wrong way for fear of a hefty fine and arrest by police unconstrained by laws of civil liberty.

As trammeled and twisted as our Constitution has been over the past two hundred and twenty-some years, it yet remains the unshaken basis of our laws (laws copied and envied the world over, even and perhaps particularly by those who "hate us") and our concept of a society built on the ideal that something as ephemeral and proclaimedly self-evident as the "pursuit of happiness" was worth enshrining, protecting, and defending in our founding documents.

Happiness and liberty cannot be taken too lightly. Freedom may be messy; but it is irreplaceable, bought only by blood and sacrifice. Never discount it, never sell it short, and never give it up. No matter how superficially attractive the alternative may appear.