It occurred to me while recently enjoying some much needed out of town time with my family that we, here in Long Beach, in California and in the U.S. sometimes take so very much for granted.

Most of us in this fine International City by the sea look about us each day and take our many freedoms, rights and liberties as nothing more than what we deserve. We accept them as axiom and we enjoy them with little thought to how we came by them in the first place.

We are often too quick to remember what we feel is our due and too slow to recall or to meet our responsibilities as a free people in a civil and lawful society.

From our – relatively limited – perspectives our freedoms and rights and liberties exist; have always existed and shall always exist, forever and ever, ad infinitum, with no requirement from ourselves other than to wake each morning and partake of it.

But this was not always and is not necessarily so.

The persons collectively referred to as the Founders, who were most responsible for creating this amazing place of freedoms, rights and liberties that most of us take so very much for granted today, put themselves, their families and their livelihood at great personal risk to do so. Dr. Franklin’s quip that they must all hang together or most assuredly hang separately was not the light jest it appears to be today. It was offered in most deadly earnest. In truth the original signers of the Declaration of Independence committed treason, punishable by death, simply by gathering together and discussing the idea of creating even the beginnings of a nation apart from the British crown.

“Freedom isn’t free,” it’s said, and this is true. Many of the Founders paid a horrible price for their involvement in declaring independence and creating this place we all take so much for granted today. Many others have sacrificed much, including their very lives, protecting and defending this great land since.

Many of the Founders had their homes, real property and other possessions confiscated or eventually destroyed during military actions. Some not only put pen to paper to affix their names to the Declaration but also served in the army and fought in the various battles in the war that was to follow, suffering and eventually dying from grievous wounds. Several were captured, imprisoned and brutalized for daring to question the authority of the crown. All were, at some point, sought and, sometimes, hunted doggedly by British military forces and other agents present on the continent.

According to colonialhall.com, one signer, Abraham Clark of New Jersey, had two sons, both of whom eventually served as officers in the army. The British captured both and tossed them in the notorious prison ship called, ironically, the Jersey, which was anchored in New York Harbor. Both sons were subjected to severe torture and brutalization for no other reason than their family ties to Mr. Clark who, despite the horrific plight of his sons, refused to recant his dedication to the cause of freedom and American Independence.

No, good readers, our freedom was, and is, not free. It came to us and has remained at very great cost. The price for maintaining our freedom has been and continues to be paid by a relative few so that all might continue to enjoy it and, ideally, remember to cherish and not squander it.

So when we, here in Long Beach, struggle, as we always seem to, over local questions such as infrastructure maintenance and public safety and wetlands conservation and museum funding and air and water pollution and flood mitigation, let’s remember the Founders, the Colonials they represented, the risks they assumed and the grievous prices they paid (by some estimates: 50,000 American casualties and some $1.8 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars) to create a nation wherein we would have the leisure to deal with such local challenges in a democratic manner.

Let’s also remember the thousands upon thousands who have fought and died here and throughout the world since that time to protect and defend our right to continue to enjoy our many freedoms, rights, liberties and our Constitutional Republic form of government.

233 years ago we struggled to define and to assert our rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the right to be Free and Independent States unburdened by a government grown, in some cases, bloated and voracious, tyrannical, unresponsive and forgetful of its proper place “in the Course of human events”.

In the United States, in California and in Long Beach, we continue to struggle with some of these same concerns and concepts to this day.

And that’s, I believe, as it should be.

I very much welcome your questions and your comments.