Freedom and Liberty

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
(Inscription on the Statue of Liberty)

From the first time I listened to the last song Johnny Cash ever recorded, “Hurt,” I’ve felt as if it could speak to several things. I’m a pretty sappy guy, in case you don’t know that already. I’m also very serious when it comes to certain things. My God, my family, and my nation. I always will be. Therefore, I interpreted the song “Hurt” in three different ways: A song to God, relating to His pain for us, how I let Him down. To my family, specifically, my wife, “What have I become, my sweetest friend?”
From the Nation of America to the world, “Everyone I know goes away in the end. You can have it all my empire of dirt...If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way.”
When we were struck on 9/11 it was shocking to us. We felt violated. We struck back, as a whole. America had to come together to defeat our enemies. For the most part, we all have a very strong attachment to the colors red, white and blue. Our national identity, meaning, our attachment to each other, our form of government, and our freedoms, threw us into action. We were victorious in Afghanistan, we were victorious in the war in Iraq. (By the way, it’s not a war anymore; it’s the establishment of a new country. The war has been over for a couple years.) We did not enter these wars to claim them as our own, but to eliminate the regimes in place at the time, with the permanent goal of returning power to the people of those countries. Not just power, but freedom. I don’t think we really get the meaning of that word. We’ve always had freedom, but many of us don’t know it.