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jimmy m
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Joined: 30 Jun 2018
Age: 75
Gender: Male
Posts: 8,463
Location: Indiana

08 Aug 2019, 7:40 am

For Americans, this past weekend was painful. On Saturday, an evil, deranged person murdered 22 people in El Paso, Texas. Not even 24 hours later, another evil, deranged person murdered nine in Dayton, Ohio.

Much will be said by politicians and political pundits in the coming days, most of which we've heard before. We will not repeat these arguments or policy debates here. Instead, we would like to focus on something far more profound: The state of the American psyche.

The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose time in a Soviet gulag converted him from communism to Orthodox Christianity, wrote in 1991:

"Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others... A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice."

This wasn't the first time he had expressed such thoughts. At Harvard's commencement address in 1978, Solzhenitsyn touched upon the same theme, as summarized by legal scholar and Princeton professor Robert P. George:

"Solzhenitsyn... warned America and the West that we had become too focused on rights and needed to refocus on obligations. We had come to embrace a false idea of liberty, conceiving of it as doing as one pleases, rather than as the freedom to fulfill one’s human potential and honor one’s conscientious duties to God and neighbor."

Too many Americans seem to have a misunderstanding of what freedom actually means, and that misunderstanding may take hold at a very young age. I specifically recall instances in grade school in which a fellow classmate would behave badly (e.g., by taking a toy from another student) and when confronted would respond, "It's a free country."

That's certainly true, but it's beside the point. Your freedoms end where another person's freedoms begin. Yet, by our collective behavior, it would seem that some of our fellow Americans never grew beyond that childish understanding of freedom.

Source: Guns, Vaccines, And Rekindling Our American Sense Of Duty


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