Freedom is an endless battle
Freedom is an endless battle
Democracy doesn't guarantee you freedom, it simply grants you the chance to fight for freedom without having a dictator turn the army on you.
Freedom is an endless battle. You have to wake up every day and fight for it, or it goes away. This has always been true and it will always be true, till the end of time. Any day you don't fight for freedom is a day the enemies of freedom are winning. Fredrick Douglas put it well:
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
When I was 15 years old my history teacher had us study Fredrick Douglas's biography exactly because my history teacher felt that Douglas understood something profound and universal about human freedom.
Democracy is a chance to fight for freedom without having an army turn their machine guns on you. That is all that democracy is. The alternative is having those machine guns used on you. Democracy makes it easier to fight for freedom, but it doesn't remove the need to fight.
Democracy isn't just about personal freedom. it's also about community. It's not enough for freedom to be won. It also has to be sustained through an emphasis on responsibilities as well as civil liberties. Negative liberty without positive rights such as education, which is important for society as well as the individual, is the same as being oppressed. To fix politics, focus on other things.