240 years ago today, March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry famously addressed the Virginia Convention:
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” Henry’s passionate declaration for independence from Britain is widely acknowledged as the catalyst for the convention’s decision to deliver Virginian troops to help fight the Revolutionary War.
“Liberty or death!” became the rallying cry throughout the colonies. Not all, but enough of the founding generation cared enough to risk their lives fighting the War for Independence. To them, it indeed amounted to a choice between liberty or death.
Much has changed since. Today, most Americans clearly care for many things other than liberty. If this were not true, Americans would by now have thrown off the chains of the Federal Reserve. Likewise for the fear-mongered, liberty-suppressing “wars” on drugs, terror, poverty, etc., and the host of other policies, programs, agencies, bureaucracies, and departments comprising the unsustainable American welfare/warfare state.
“Fear is the passion of slaves” said Henry. By and large then, are Americans not slaves? Are Americans not afraid of liberty itself?
“When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, sir, was the primary object.” By 1775, the trend was running away from liberty. Henry’s generation helped slow it, if only temporarily. How do Britain’s punitive “Intolerable Acts” (or “Coercive Acts”), imposed upon the colonies – the final straw of-sorts before revolution – stack up to today’s abuses against Americans by their federal government? The lying, the spying, the inflation, the taxes, the regulations, the wars, the groping by the TSA at airports, the domestic militarization, the multitudinous assaults on civil liberties and the pervasive disdain and utter disrespect for private property and voluntary economic transactions? If alive today Henry would be the first to thunder “Liberty or death!”
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http://www.voicesofliberty.com/article/240-years-after-patrick-henrys-liberty-or-death-speech/
