Mojo Monday: Freedom

"Every human has four endowments ~ self awareness, consciousness, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom...The power to choose, to respond, to change." ~Stephen R. Covey

Freedom: 1 : the quality or state of being free: as a : the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action b : liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another

An incredibly historical speech about Freedom was made by Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington DC.  It was his I Have A Dream speech.

 

Nelson Mandela said that during the twenty-six years he spent in a South African prison that “I thought continually of the day when I would walk free.” Yet his embrace of the Ubuntu philosophy gave him a great perspective, "It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black.  I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.  A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bard of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.

I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me.  The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.  When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both...For to be free is not merely to case off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."

Victor Frankel, a Viennese psychiatrist, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz during WWII, made this observation about the essence of freedom: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember those who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread....They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances — to choose one’s own way.”

What are your thoughts on Freedom? 
What does Freedom mean to you?

If you want to contemplate the meaning of Freedom even more, one place to start is a web site called The Campaign to Liberate Freedom.