Becoming the Freedom Preacher
I have been “on the road” to becoming the Freedom Preacher for as far back as I can remember. This is a brief recap of my journey.
I am convinced that people can get along, that most of the problems they encounter can be solved or at least improved, and that the benefits can be far greater than is commonly realized.
Widespread awareness of this simple yet powerful fact could bring us the long desired but ever elusive “World Peace.” Sadly, as we all seem to realize, this is extremely unlikely.
Yes, we all share the larger world with all its troubles. But we also live in our own individual version of the world as well. It’s this world – your world – that I believe can be improved.
Why do I feel so strongly about this that I have become the Freedom Preacher? A few key events in my life helped put me on this path:
A Cold War story: "They are people just like us!"
I grew up with a lot of conflict, much of it in my immediate family. But it was a global conflict that provided me with my earliest glimpse of the absurdity of it all. This was somewhere toward the beginning of the Cold War, when Americans were learning to live in fear of those evil Soviets.
I was pretty young — maybe 7 or 8 years old — when I read an article in a magazine that has stuck with me ever since.
Full Article
Freedom does not mean license
— A.S. Neill, founder of Summerhill School, Suffolk, England
The one thing that I couldn’t seem to figure out in my younger days was that as stupid as conflict appeared to be, why was it so popular? There didn’t seem to be any part of life that wasn’t affected by conflict – again, most of it unnecessary. And stupid.
It wound up being an Englishman from the early part of the twentieth century who helped me begin to understand where conflict, or at least much of it, comes from.