As July approaches, I am excited about one of my favorite holidays, Independence Day. I have so many good memories of the 4th of July: eating fresh watermelon and grilled burgers with extended family, going on leisurely pontoon rides, shooting off roman candles and bottle rockets with my siblings, and watching the firework display out over the lake. It is a great blessing to be able to do these things with my family, year after year.
Despite the celebrations, I often forget to contemplate the reason for this holiday. For the men and women of the early United States, freedom was a hard-won battle, gained through the price of many brave soldier’s lives. However, to secure the “blessings of liberty”, no price was too high. Freedom was and continues to be the greatest ideal of our country—and for good reason, as many nations in the 18th century (and even today) could not guarantee the freedoms of religion, press, and speech.
Upon reflection, one question keeps coming back to me: what is this freedom for? We all implicitly know that freedom is important and worth fighting for, but freedom is an ability, the potential for something, and not an end in itself. Certainly, freedom can be used for good things, like providing for your family or serving the poor. However, it can also be used for evil as seen in the exploitation of workers by American corporations or the racially motivated violence of the 1960s. If we understand freedom as merely the ability to make decisions for ourselves, we misunderstand what freedom is for: the good.
This question about freedom’s purpose came into focus when I watched Unbroken, a film following the life of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic Athlete and WWII veteran who fought for the United States on the Pacific Front. In May 1943, Zamperini was on rescue mission when the engine failed, and his plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Most of his crew was killed and he was left stranded in a lifeboat, hundreds of miles from land. He survived an incredible 47 days at sea, subsisting on raw fish and birds, until he was rescued by the Japanese military. His trouble didn’t end there, as he endured nearly two years of hard labor and torture at the hands of his captors. Despite his difficult circumstances, Zamperini did his best to support his fellow prisoners, going so far as to suffer beatings in place of his comrades. He survived his time at the camp and was released in August of 1945. Later in life he reverted to Christianity and returned to Japan to personally forgive the men who had imprisoned and tortured him.
The life of Louis Zamperini exemplifies that true freedom is not really the ability to do whatever you want. In the prison camps, Zamperini was not free to choose what food to eat or what work to engage in, as the Japanese had taken this away from him. Instead, Zamperini lived out a higher kind of freedom when he chose to support his fellow prisoners in the face of persecution. Though his captors had taken away his physical freedom, Zamperini’s interior freedom was only strengthened through his experience in the prison camp. Therefore, it is clear that true freedom is the freedom to do the good. Only by embracing and living out this kind of freedom can we hope to build our society into a place where people flourish.
