by James Glaser
June 18/19, 2003

Freedom! People are constantly writing about and talking about, how we must protect our freedom. I look back at my life and see that we have already lost too much. There has been a constant assault on our personal freedoms ever since World War II.

When I was going to grade school at Holy Spirit Catholic School almost every one of my class mates had either a pocket knife or a sheath knife. That is right, kids could bring knives to school as we needed them for playing Mumblypeg and Stretch at recess. The Nuns would watch and applaud the winner with us. I never remember anyone getting hurt and for sure no one even thought of using one of these blades for a weapon. These knives were a tool that we treated with respect, because you could cut yourself with one.

I can always remember fireworks as a kid and my dad and I had hours of fun with them. Later on he would give me a gross of "cheery bombs" and packets of "black cats" as he knew he had taught me how to be safe with them. Now in Minnesota and many other states a person can't have exploding fireworks as they might hurt themselves.

Something else fits right in here thinking about my youth. Kids today have to go to school with many "foreign kids," the children of illegal aliens. Their classroom is constantly slowed as the teacher must explain again and again what they had said, because so many of the students are learning English. When I was a kid we did have a couple foreign kids in our school and it was that way when I went to public school too. Back then we protected our borders and people that wanted to become American citizens did it the legal way. There is a quota on legal immigrants, as there should be.

Today, we still have those people that are coming to America legally, but millions are coming here any way they can and our government does almost nothing to stop them. This is not racist, but a fact, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are getting a free education at the expense of our children. So our children lose the freedom to have a good education, one where all the children in the class can understand the language the teacher is speaking.

Another thing that has changed since I was a kid. In the bars there were no video games, but there was a pinball machine. At one my dad and mom went to they had a prize board above the pinball machine and top scores would get a number and could win a prize. My dad won my first 22 caliber rifle there. No paper work, they just handed him that rifle and he handed it to me. Yes, I did have "gun safety," from my dad and his brothers, all veterans of the war. They were strict and I learned very fast that gun safety was important and one had to stay alert while handling a firearm.

My dad would bring home a couple boxes of shells or I could at the age of thirteen, go to the hardware store and buy my own. This was not that long ago, about 1959-60. My friends and I would go down to the Mississippi River and shoot cans for target practice. Some time since then America got scared and all youth became so dumb we couldn't trust them any more with anything that could hurt them.

As a kid we all made pipe bombs out of the powder from our parents shotgun shells. Big ones and little ones depending on how much powder you could get. We blew up stumps and some fish in the river. I never heard of anyone getting hurt and when I went in the Marines, I had a real respect for hand grenades.

In Boy Scouts we would build model rockets and I bet they went up a mile, well it seemed like a mile as they went out of sight!

Today kids can't have those same model rockets we had, as the President will not allow them to try them out. You see in the name of making all of us safe, President Bush signed the Safe Explosives Act which somehow outlaws all purchases and use of large model rocket engines. The children of today, with an interest in science and space will have to buy a permit and get finger printed in order to have some fun and learn quite a lot about how rockets work. Remember these kids are our Nations future. Of course those permit fees would not even cover the cost of this new program of protecting us from ourselves.

There are numerous examples of lost freedoms in America and here is another. Sometime when I was young there was a women I wanted to be with, but she was in Chicago and I was in Saint Paul. Well I called her up and asked her out and said I would be there in a few hours. I headed to the airport and was almost there before I realized that I didn't have my wallet, but I did have about two hundred dollars in my pocket. I kept right on going and when I got there I bought a ticket (with cash) got on the flight and took a cab to her apartment. We had a great weekend and I flew home. I was never asked that whole weekend for my identification. Without the freedom to move around our country, who knows, but maybe my three fine children would have never been born as I married that woman.

A few more generations of the government protecting us from ourselves and Americans will be so "Namby Pamby" that anyone will be able to take over our nation.