But with great personal responsibility comes great freedom. We live in a country that sings the praises of liberty and individualism while strongly urging us to follow a very narrow path. Freedom of speech has been replaced by a media controlled by fewer than a dozen companies. Freedom of action has been replaced with a wide array of consumer goods. Freedom from oppression has been replaced with 20 years of eroding civil rights.
Freedom is a use it or lose it proposition, and meaningless unless it is exercised.
When we run around like maniacs and do pointless things that would get us imprisoned in most of the rest of the world, we're doing our sacred duty as Americans to express the ideal of liberty this country was founded on. And it's true that mass media, mass commerce, mass everything has eroded the traditional bonds that gave people a feeling of place. But the possibility of community hasn't been destroyed - we've merely been challenged to come up with new ways to foster it. By gathering and contributing on a purely voluntary basis, we have learned that if we give of ourselves freely, our gifts come back to us tenfold. In doing so, we have created a community that is real and lasting.