By BRAEDEN COOK, Guest Columnist
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” former President Ronald Reagan said to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce in 1961. This quote — one of Reagan’s most famous — I have found to be true all the way down to the individual level.
I believe it gives us some insight into life in general, and it might explain why we are having so much trouble in this country today.
Just as it is the job of each prior generation to instill the values of freedom within their progeny, it becomes the responsibility of the current generation to do the same.
That was the message Reagan was trying to convey. In many ways, this translates to everyone’s everyday life. People’s decisions will affect their futures. They choose to take the high road or the low road. To break the law or to obey it. To lie or not to lie. To buckle down and finish the assignment or to push it off, doing it last minute and not doing it well.
In all those cases, there is a potential loss to be taken, a consequence, a loss of freedom.
The law, for instance. Even breaking a traffic law might result in a ticket, which means a loss of money and a loss to anything else on which a person might have spent that money. A minor loss of financial freedom. Another example: lying. When people lie, they make themselves slaves to those lies, lest they get caught.
If caught, the liar, at best, loses some of the trust others had in him. And at worst, people never fully trust the liar again. With the assignments, it limits where you can go.
With the lower grade in the class, the opportunities you have are lessened. It may not be in a major way; it might be hardly anything.
But if you do it again and again, the damage, the loss of opportunity and the loss of freedom adds up. This is not to say that for freedom we must be perfect. No. Far from it.
We all make bad decisions sometimes and choose the easy way out.
But for freedom to reign — at least freedom in this country — we must choose the right, good decision over the easy decision more often then not.
With good decisions come more opportunities to live better lives. This is the freedom of America, and yes, it is definitely not easy, nor is it perfect.
But every generation of Americans has chosen, at least in some sense, to follow this way of life. Now we must decide if it will continue.
Braeden Cook is the chairman of the Northwestern College Republicans Club.