A Better World (Marcus Sakey) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги (ч. 23)

Here’s the thing about freedom: Freedom is not a couch.

It’s not a television, or a car, or a house.

It’s not an item you can possess. You cannot put freedom on layaway; you cannot refinance freedom.

Freedom is something you need to fight for, not once, but every single day. The nature of freedom is that it is fluid; like water in a leaking bucket, the tendency is for it to drain away.

Left untended, the holes through which freedom escapes widen. When politicians restrict our rights in order to “protect us,” freedom is lost. When the military refuses to disclose basic facts, freedom is lost. Worst of all, when fear becomes a part of our lives, we willingly surrender freedom for a promise of safety, as if freedom weren’t the very basis of safety.

There’s a famous poem written about the complacency of the German people under Nazi rule; today, it might read:

First they came for the revolutionaries,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a revolutionary.

Then they came for the intellectuals,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an intellectual.

Then they came for the tier ones,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a tier one.

Then they came for the brilliants,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a brilliant.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me.

—From the introduction to I Am John Smith