No one knows better than I do how true the old maxim is that you don’t know how much you value a thing until it’s taken away.
In my case, what was taken away was freedom. Or more accurately, maybe I never had it in the first place, having been born and raised to the age of 18 in Birmingham, England.
But I recognized genuine freedom when I saw it in this country, and when I was given the chance to come here to attend college on a basketball scholarship, I vowed to stay and help preserve it for future generations.
That’s why I sought, and on Sept. 22nd successfully obtained, my American citizenship.
As socialist hell holes go, there are worse starting points than mine. At least I didn’t have to sneak into the U.S. on a makeshift raft from Cuba or a travel hundreds of miles in a protest march from Venezuela.
Still, you find very few of those so-called progressive Americans clamoring to create a workers’ paradise in this country emigrating to England, let alone China or Afghanistan, to see what socialism looks like.
Great Britain was once a proud country whose people twice beat back the looming threat of tyranny in world wars that approached her shores but advanced no further. The bloody struggles, however, seemed to sap its will to preserve what it had only recently fought so fiercely to defend.
Almost from the moment the second armistice was signed in 1945, Britain fell under the spell of smooth-talking Labor Party leaders who made extravagant promises they couldn’t keep and vowed to pay for it all with someone else’s tax dollars.
Just as the socialist wannabes in this country are doing now.
The England I was born into in the early-1990s was already well down the road to socialism, and by now there may be no turning back, with virtually every human endeavor — especially productive industry — being taxed out of existence.
These days, the nation is all-but-irreconcilably divided into haves and have nots, and it’s the have-nots in the ever-shrinking private sector being told they must continue to provide the unproductive haves in government with inflated wages and lifetime benefits.
Any first-semester economics student recognizes the system is unsustainable, but with those on the dole now comprising the majority, there’s little political incentive to make meaningful reforms before the inevitable collapse comes.
To prevent that from happening, I’ll be here working hard to ensure my new country doesn’t continue its misguided journey down that same wrong road to decay and servitude.
And I’ll be doing it with the Freedom Foundation, whose staff, board of directors, supporters and friends are unrivaled in the conservative movement.
I’m proud to call myself an American, and I’m proud to stand with my fellow patriots to defend the freedoms we all hold so dear. For me, it’s personal because I know what the future holds when you lose freedom.
