So, after nearly a two year absence (long enough to enjoy a healthy portion of crow), the Red, Right, and True blog is back. I’d like to say back by popular demand of my readers (otherwise known as my family and friends), but in truth, my re-energized need to express my thoughts on current events to anyone who cares to indulge me. First, mea culpa. Donald Trump defied all prognosticators, especially this one, in walloping Hillary Clinton (aka the worst candidate ever) and winning the presidency. I am exceedingly glad he did for a number of reasons that can be distilled down to two: First, and most obviously, Trump winning means Hillary did not (how fortunate that is for our country cannot be overstated!); Second, Trump has governed far more conservatively than I imagined (from tax cuts to Supreme Court nominations), which is not to say that I love everything the Tweeter in Chief has done. I don’t.

With that said, however, I want to focus this post on what I believe to be the defining issue of our time: freedom. That’s right, freedom—not global warming, immigration, health care, or gun control, though certainly elements of all of these issues relate to our freedoms. The same is true for Russian election meddling, police shootings, and even our foreign policy. Why? Because, freedom lies at the core of what America is all about. In fact, the constitution, which is considered by many as one of the greatest documents ever created, is basically a freedom manifesto and contract between a government and its citizens.

Sadly, an alarming segment of the population (on both sides of the political divide) are at best ill-informed if not downright ignorant of what this great document says. Perhaps that should be—at best ignorant and worse ill-informed, since it is a toss-up as to which is more dangerous. Regardless, few citizens really understand that the constitution was written specifically to define and limit government powers. In fact, you might be surprised to learn that many of the founders opposed the Bill of Rights—not because they didn’t want Americans to have those guaranteed rights, but because they feared the list might be interpreted as a finite description of citizens’ rights. The tenth amendment, thereby, is largely a compromise aiming to explicitly limit federal power to what is outlined in the constitution.

Thus, the tenth amendment makes it absolutely clear: the constitution was not designed to be a living, breathing document; it was intended to be interpreted as written, which is to say: here’s what the government can do—nothing else. Okay, so maybe they wanted it to be barely breathing, which is why they included a daunting amendment process. Clearly though, changes were not supposed to be easy, and they certainly weren’t supposed to happen at the whim of judges. Therein lies the rub: Every time a court breathes new meaning into the constitution or one of its amendments which increases federal power, we citizens lose a little bit of our freedom, whether it’s a mandate that citizens purchase a product, a limit to the amount of money they can contribute to a political campaign, or countless other encroachments. The irony is how many and how often Americans are not only willing to not just surrender our freedoms but to demand the government usurp them. Doubtless that many do not realize that they are doing this. Like me, they probably grew up seeing freedom and equality as two sides of the same coin. In fact, however, they are mostly in stark opposition to each other. Others are content to trade freedom (especially when they see it as someone else’s freedom because it comes in the form of someone else’s money or property) for something they feel more valuable or more palatable. They are woefully mistaken. One American’s loss of freedom is every American’s loss of freedom. They’ll get around to all of us eventually.

Freedom, after all, is hard. It’s messy. It means putting up with things you may not like.  It means outcomes that are uneven, illogical, and seemingly unjust. It’s painful and precious, and has made this, despite what Andrew Cuomo might think, the greatest country in the history world. A lot of our countrymen sacrificed greatly to give it to us. We’d better start appreciating it and working harder to preserve it.