Independence Day and Freedom?

While Americans grill tons of beef burgers and more this Independence Day weekend, recall that freedom has a price.

Today's freedom that citizens take for granted, at times, is tagged with the price paid with pioneers of parents, grandparents, and, immigrants, perhaps your own and mine. Their struggle
to build and bond in rootedness and relating in dire squalor and heat cost them dearly. On their shoulders we stand this day. And, I'm grateful to God and them.

Freedom is not free.

Wars, and the loss of life like that of my own brother, Lucas, in Vietnam, among countless other battles brewing daily prove the cost to be free.

This Independence Day saw the U.S. break from the link and chain of another power.

Independence can be a good thing, and is today.

To be interdependent as a global people and village pokes on to pause and ponder how tied nations are in need of each other beyond goods and services to buy and sell.

The war on drugs cost $155 million, and, yet, addiction holds this beloved country hostage.

Forty yers ago this past June 17th, President Richard Nixon asked Congress for those millions, yet, regretably, only weeks ago, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, declared:

"The global war on drugs has failed."

It has.

And, we are still not free from attachment disorders as the ancient spiritual leaders, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, Spain, dubbed that wretched robbery of one's deepest meaning, and, soul, the center of one's eternal thrist for more to quench that void and hole in one's heart.

In spite of that war on drugs, what is new now, and increasingly alarming, is the rising trend of extreme underage drinking and its epidemic in the good ole U.S.A.

Young lives are ruined and meeting death daily throughout the metropolitan areas and urban settings where substance and process addictions of gambing and alcohol dependence locks its jaws in an unending grip on humanity.

Individualism is cherished here in this land. It anoints freedom on persons to define themselves as they want, and, to explore the world on one's own terms as ghastly as they may be.

American television watched this horrific drama unfold last January in Tuscon, Arizona when Jared Loughner, a loner, took six lives.

He didn't know most of his neighbors. And, neither did his neighbors know each other, The Washington Post writer, Philip Rucker reported.

"They're all like that in a sea of anonymity," Edmund Cardinal Szoka told me on the telephone the other day from his home in Northville, MI., when I asked him to join a seminar on "love of God and neighbor," and its meaning and message today.

"I know some of my neighbors, but not many," the retired archbishop of Detroit, and, former Vatican leader, confessed.

Independence challenges humans to connect and know neighbors, nevertheless, an art lost since World War II, or, at least when front porches went and were no longer built facing the street and sidewalk as others pased. Attached garages keep residents from even facing each other each day as they walk from the house into the garage and into one's vehicle.

Freedom can be lonely, also, as people tell me about it in counseling in their own sea of anonymity, and desire for connecting in relationships face to face.

The Golden Rule of "love of God and neighbor" needs reclaiming in this Nation this holiday.

How can I be a neighbor and friend of the invisible God if I neglect to know and greet my neighbor next door who I see?

Commitment to connecting costs.

It does.

It's like freedom. Bought with a price.

Yet, we win some and lose some like the war on drugs.

God bless America, and, God bless the globe, beginning with the blessing I am to my neighbors
nearest me dwelling in Harrison Township or Royal Oak, Orchard Lake, or Detroit, Michigan.