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Liberty, Rights and Four Freedoms
Cold night last night. Thinking about the slow collapse of my circle of friends: one out in the street; another stuck in assisted living for the rest of their life; a few more stuck in their cycles of underemployment, spite and judgementalism. And me, too useless to be of any help. This is how societies break down.
Toward the culmination of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt shifted his and the Democratic Party’s legislative focus to his Second Bill of Rights, based upon his vision of “Four Freedoms.” These pillars, “the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear,” laid out by the FDR Presidential Library, “symbolized America’s war aims and gave hope in the following years to a war-wearied people because they knew they were fighting for freedom.”
“We have come to a clear realization,” Roosevelt spoke in his 1944 State of the Union Address, “of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made…