Freedom

 I love Freedom.  This thought comes to me because of Dennis Prager's 250th fireside chat. Dennis told about not wanting to eat dinner at home with his parents when he was 15 years old. His parents allowed it and gave him $1.50 on weeknights to get his own dinner. It was a freedom thing to him. And as he travels, he always rents a car to get himself around.  I identify with that and so I wanted to explore the ways I love freedom. Slaves yearn to be free, but human nature wants to be taken care of until we get old then we really want to be independent as long as we can. I wanted to leave home at 18. I didn't like my home life and I wanted to leave as soon as I could.  A very kind couple took me in and allowed me to stay with them until I could get a job and be on my own. I am very grateful to them to this day. I am sure I could have stayed with them longer than I did but I loved my freedom as a young man. I didn't have a great job, but I managed. I ate a lot of spaghetti in those days, and I could fill up the gas tank on my car for $6.00. It was tight but I loved being on my own. I loved to travel, road trips as I call them. I would take a month off and get in my pickup with a canopy and sleep in the back and get a shower in the morning at a Truckstop. I didn't like paying for the cost of a motel especially if I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep. I felt like it was wasted money. On a road trip if I had trouble sleeping, I'd get up and drive until I got sleepy and try again.  When I went through my first divorce at age 38 to 39, I stayed at Mom's house for just a short while and I just didn't like it, it wasn't my space. I lived in the back of my pickup with a canopy for a while, I'd take clean clothes and go into the exercise area where they had showers and get a shower in the morning and go to work. I was still paying the mortgage and the other bills where my ex and children lived, including groceries and didn't feel like I could afford rent anywhere for myself. That is until security at my place of employment caught me and said I could not do that, I had to get a place to live. My first option was renting a room in a house, I did not like that. I soon found a cheap studio apartment in a bad section of town with a shared bathroom. I liked that much better having my own space. My landlord had a very small one-bedroom apartment in a better part of town for a little bit more money and I moved there. About the same time my ex reported me to support enforcement for not paying child support. That was actually a blessing, they set my child support at $500 a month. A lot less then I was paying for the mortgage, telephone, electricity and groceries where my ex and children were living. Because I had checks to show where I paid for all that stuff, I did not owe any back child support.  When you look at all this stuff, I really did value my freedom. Once on a road trip I stopped at an aunt and uncle's house to spend the night. I was welcome but they noted I was just like my dad, just show up without any warning. I don't like to plan trips and don't know when I will be anywhere, so I didn't do that again. I realized how inconsiderate it was to just show up without any warning. We are in danger of losing our freedoms that we love so much with our bickering back and forth for power between the left and right. We want power and control, but do we realize what we are giving up having that power and control. Once our freedom is gone it will be very hard to ever get it back again. Think about all the freedoms you have, is it really worth it to lose it to have control of the other side? When one side gets that control, in reality we all will lose our freedoms, because it will be the political elites that will then control all of us. In the end we all lose.  One side's politicians will win but we will all lose in the end, and it will be the few and powerful in Washington that will control us all. God bless, LVZ.