Freedom

This year all of the students at Provost were strongly encouraged (and bribed with cash prizes!) to participate in Provo's Freedom Festival Essay Contest. The topic was a quote that was pretty difficult for an elementary student to understand, so I was proud of Nathan that he wanted to participate. (The original quote is broken up into sections in his essay, in quotation marks.) He and I talked about the quote before he started writing, but the ideas are all his own!

Freedom

   "Our liberty depends on our education, our laws, and habits . . ." this is much more than a quote, this is what we live by. Our freedom depends on our education because if you did not do well in school then you could not be a math professor, if that is what you wanted to be. You would not have the freedom to choose and would end up picking cotton or grapes. It depends on our laws and habits because we need good laws to help us stay free. For instance, they have made a law that everyone has to have health insurance. I feel that this law is not good, for health insurance costs money and that is something not everyone has.
   Our freedom "is founded on morals and religion." To me, this means that if someone believes that God wants everyone to be nice to each other, then that person will be kind to everyone. If we fight each other too much, then other countries could catch us off guard and take away our freedom. "On the influence all these produceon public opinion before that opinion governs rulers." I take this to mean that people can vote. Voting is the core of our freedom. The presidency does not run through bloodline. People can vote for who they want the president to be. In other countries you cannot vote for a new king every four years. You are stuck with him for the rest of his life. Here we can also vote for laws to change, too. If enough people want to change the law then it will be taken to the Supreme Court for them to decide. I think that is a good way to run our country. I am grateful to have freedom. I hope we will continue to live by what Fisher Ames said. In this way we can sustain our freedom.