Keep close watch on Freedoms - lest they be lost

By Jason Wadlington

The sound of glass breaking awakens you. As sleep leaves you, you realize you have an invader. Instinctively, you roll over and reach for your only means of personally defending yourself against someone bigger and meaner—but you realize that you turned in your firearm months earlier with the abolition of the Second Amendment.

You make your way down the hallway unarmed, praying the intruder is too. He isn’t. Seeing you, he brandishes a handgun, and directs you back to your room while he makes off with your television. Understanding that defeat is inevitable, you return to your room and place an urgent call to the police.

The operator explains there has been a rash of home invasions since the Second Amendment was abolished, and that a unit will respond to your call within six to eight hours. You hang up the phone and go back to bed. What else could you do?

Hours later you awake to the comforting sound of police sirens. Today is going to be the start to a new chapter in your life. But, this chapter has been created through necessity—not free will. After the last tax increases, your employer of 15 years was unable to stay afloat, and you found yourself unemployed. But you have been guaranteed that these new taxes will be all that are necessary to save socialized medicine—already floundering and inefficient after only three years.

You get a job in a government office, but it’s a 90-minute ride on your bicycle—you had to sell your car because of the high registration fees.

After endless pedaling you arrive at your new job—a government-run food bank. Your duties are to place two loaves of bread in each person’s bag.

As the day drags along, the procession of needy never seems to end, and you begin to think back to those news clips of life in the Soviet Union, when a familiar face in standing before you. It is your former boss of five years, who used to take vacations twice a year. Now she was waiting for free food. A simple nod of acknowledgment sends her on her way and you into a state of depression. Your once prosperous country is ruined.

You arrive home just in time to hear the phone ring. Your daughter is in the hospital after a botched abortion that was caused by inexperienced doctors and faulty equipment (a.k.a. socialized medicine). Abortion? You didn’t even know she was pregnant. But because the Supreme Court declared that you don’t have a right to know, you didn’t.

By now you’ve probably realized this is only a concoction of the imagination, yet it is a fantasy for some. This hypothetical situation is what will result if our nation keeps driving away the rights of life, liberty and pursuit of property that Americans have enjoyed for so long, but have become dispassionate about.

This is a struggle for the future—a future of freedom and opportunity, or a future of endless despair.

— This columnist can be reached at collegian@csufresno.edu