“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the rights singled out by Thomas Jefferson as those most deserving the protection of government as he and his fellow founders sought to recover the ‘rights of Englishmen’ of which they felt they were being deprived.
This makes it more than ironic that those rights no longer exist in the country of England, where two very young children no longer have life, after their parents had their liberty taken away and were deprived of the happiness that preserving their children’s lives had brought.
Everyone knows that resources are finite and demands can be great, and times may come when providers may feel that time and money spent in prolonging life in hard cases may be spent better in helping somebody else. This wasn’t the case with the two children now dead in England, whose parents were stopped, not from trying to draw upon government funds, but from trying to use their own money to help them. In each case, they wanted to remove their child from the country, where they might have been aided by somebody else.
These parents might just as well have been living in East Germany before liberation, for all the control that they had over their lives or their funds and families and freedom of movement. The only things missing were the barbed wire and armed guards on the ramparts of the Berlin Wall.
This was still worse as England has long been a bastion of freedom — the first country around to put restraints upon government power to create rights upon which citizens could count, From Edward II on, it has been removing such kings as displeased it, knocking off Richard II, Richard III, and Charles I; striking a deal with his son, Charles II, not to do much of anything; tossing out his brother, James II, who had not learned the lesson; and importing William and Mary, who had.
God save the King had long been the motto, but God help the King if he got on the wrong side of the merchants of London or the major landowners, who were the king-makers in actual politics. Elizabeth I, the greatest of all, ruled and “campaigned” like an American president, always in touch with her grassroots supporters. If she could have, she would have held focus groups. Before their great Civil War, the members of Parliament blockaded the doors of the Commons against the King’s soldiers, come to arrest his more virulent critics. In no other place at that time would such things have been possible. Not too long after, the king lost his head.
The worst of all this is less that these children are dead (children die sometimes and these might have died anyhow) but that their parents have lost their own agency — their right to do, move, and spend as they pleased in order to save them.
These are the things that define personal freedom. If you do not possess them then you are a slave.
People in England despise Donald Trump (as do millions here), and when he was elected they went into spasms, calling him a fascist and a Fuhrer in waiting; insisting our rights were at risk. As of this moment our rights remain intact, but pious and liberal middle class bureaucrats in our Mother Country have imposed a totalitarian system upon their own people.
They don’t need a civil war, much less a beheading, to restore their basic rights. But someone should do something, fast.
