What Kind of Freedom Will We Choose?

“Hello beautiful,” my father-in-law always said when he saw me. A formidable bull of a man, opinionated and outspoken, he intimidated those who never glimpsed the tender heart that resided beneath his brash exterior.

The youngest of seven children, he grew up fatherless after his father deserted the family during the throes of the Great Depression. But the women in his life armed him with strength, faith, and a surprising tenderness.

His mother managed to eke out a living by running a boarding house, and his grandmother gave him a steel-covered bible that he carried with him into the trenches of war.

He had to lie to get into those war trenches. He was only 17, too young to sign up, so he claimed he was older. Since no one scrutinized his birth certificate, he joined the Marines and set off for countries he had never seen to fight for a freedom he had only savored through the lens of poverty.

When I got to know my father-in-law many decades later, I found out there were three things he hated: racism, men who mistreated women, and people who disdained the freedom he fought for.

I also discovered that he told the same stories over and over, some of them stemming from those days in the war. He especially liked to tell me about Iwo Jima, and how surprised he was to emerge from that battleground alive.

He wasn't a religious zealot, but he frequently said, "I must have had a guardian angel looking after me, there were so many close calls during the war."

At first, his stories made me impatient. “I’ve heard that before,” I thought but didn’t say as he regaled me again and again with stories of the times he might have died if not for a quirk of fate. A sergeant made a last-minute decision, avoiding a fatal trap. A moonless, cloudy night provided life-saving cover of darkness. My father-in-law escaped enemy fire that left most of the troops wounded or dead.

He talked on and on, trying my patience.

But later, I came to view his stories as the measure of a man who loved freedom enough to fight and risk everything for it. I also came to realize I took my own freedoms for granted.

I could sip my morning coffee and listen to the news, a cacophony of voices from different newscasters spouting opinions they were free to express. I could work or not work, write or not write, read whatever books I chose, worship wherever I wanted or not worship at all, run to the corner store and unthinkingly gather whatever I wanted to eat.

My freedoms were a lush banquet of choices that I grabbed and squandered. They were freedoms that had never been tried or tested in the fiery furnace of authoritarianism and brutality.

I had grown up in a country without war, and I took my freedom for granted, unlike my father-in-law, who had war and freedom etched into his soul.

But my father-in-law died years ago, and these days, I have paid more attention to what the fiery furnace of authoritarianism and brutality looks like. War-torn cities, once beautiful, are reduced to rubble. People, living and loving, enjoying their precious and transient freedoms, are tortured, and murdered. Or they are forced to flee lives that were, in retrospect, both ordinary and wonderful.

We humans have the power to create and destroy. It’s a power that begins in the human imagination and spills over into beauty or devastation; a power directed by love or hate, compassion or indifference, greed or generosity.

To those of us accustomed to comfort and freedom, the prospects of destruction are appalling. Yet history shows us none of this is new or unusual. Wars and rumors of wars have existed from the beginning of recorded history, with powerful men making war, and powerless people suffering.

We see it in Ukraine, with a theme as old as time. It has played out again and again with the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots, the Neros of the world. As long as there is evil, there is war. And as long as the human spirit can rise like a Phoenix from the ashes of destruction, there is hope.

But hope and freedom come with a price. My father-in-law was willing to pay it. Others paid with their lives so the rest of us could choose the way we want to live. But this choice produces a conundrum. If we elect to enjoy freedom selfishly, frittering it away in self-indulgent bits and pieces, opting for comfort and safety above all else, we risk the freedom we have chosen.

Sometimes risking the minor comforts of freedom is the only way we can embrace the larger freedoms of spirit and purpose that compel us to be better than we are.

Nelson Mandela spent over 27 years in prison because he fought for freedom. After his release, he said, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

John F. Kennedy said, “If freedom is to survive and prosper, it will require the sacrifice, the effort and the thoughtful attention of every citizen.”

What kind of freedom will we choose? Will we settle for the self-indulgent choices that ultimately put our larger, more glorious freedoms at risk, or will we support a broader freedom for the world?