Slavery and death

What a title to follow.

One of my favorite movies of all time is 300. This particular scene is one of the most breath-taking and inspiring moments of the film. King Leonidas knows that his next actions will leave him and his country two options: submission/slavery or death. He chooses death (after seeking his Queens approval which I will get into later as he did not have to do this).

So why death? Freedom. Simple as that. We Americans should know this inside and out. We are a free country after all. Sadly, not a lot of us truly know what freedom means. Freedom is more than capitalism (the cardiovascular system of our economy), more than speech, more than religion, more than assembly, more than every other aspect of the constitution. It's all of these things combined at once and it even goes beyond that. It is respect and responsibility. It is also blood, war, and death.

Now, I will never (probably) know the extent of what freedom is because I will never (probably) be as intimate with blood, war, and death as our courageous soldiers, airmen and marines are every day of their lives. I do know that this aspect of freedom will never be completely avoided.

We are a unique country in that we have had freedoms without constant internal war for a very, very, very long time.

We are not unique in that we are forgetting how we got here.