...it reminded me that our country was founded a several important values, among them freedom, peace, faith, and acceptance. Regardless of the length of such a list, the most important value is freedom. Today, The Star Spangled Banner reminded me of this. I think we sometimes take liberty for granted. We encroach on the arrant liberty of others, often via some justification that sounds noble on the surface. We might deny the need to defend our liberty aggressively. In my view, people who do this are not doing so out of malice but rather out of both a lack of foresight and an ignorance of history. There is nothing more precious at the institutional level than freedom. Love is more precious and dear at the personal level, yet love is an unlimited but very individual gift from person to person. Our founders had the brilliant insight that freedom is not a gift of man; it is an inalienable birthright granted by our Creator. Our country's creed demands, not requests, that we resist, with force if necessary, all attempts to destroy our liberty . Most of the time, the American ideals interact harmoniously. When attacked by those who wish to destroy our ideals and our collective sense of self, Americans must decide which value is at the heart of our culture. Do we accept and tolerate the values of those who seek to destroy our way of life and replace it with their own? In these cases, liberty trumps peace; liberty trumps compassion; liberty trumps tolerance; liberty trumps acceptance; liberty trumps understanding. We need not always listen to the rest of the world. The American "experiment" of government was founded on a novel idea that is still not fully shared anywhere else in the world -- that life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and other natural rights are not privileges granted by man. Remember this the next time you hear or see the attacks, whether verbal or physical, whether direct or surreptitious, on our actions to defend this ideal. We are the only People who live by this credo, written into our Constitution, and we hold it so dear that we have always fought with deadly force the people who wish to return liberty to a right granted by man. This is what came to me this day, two years later.