It's time to fight for Constitutional rights

What is the value of personal freedom?

To a person who has none, possibly everything. The ability to walk down a sandy beach. The ability to search for employment that is pleasing. The ability to read, write, listen to and speak words that hold truth for oneself. The ability to freely travel between countries. The ability to marry a person of one's choice, create a family and a home. The ability to expand one's knowledge and engage in meaningful dialogue. The ability to question one's government, as granted by the amendments to the Constitution, and to be free from search or seizure without probable cause.

How much we daily take for granted.

Three distinct events in the past week tweaked the grounding upon which I measure my personal freedoms. The first drew from what seemed a harmless e-mail I received from a friend, a tasteless joke about makeup that included an image of the president. Laughable, but not serious, except that one of the recipient's in my friends broadcast mailing took offense. He accused my friend of propagating the "dirty work of the left," and my friend leans about as much to the right as anyone I know.

I continue to be frustrated by this divisive squaring off of the red states against the blue. Since my social orientation is tilted left, my friend's received e-mail must mean that a select group of people see me as a dirty blue.

I'm not quite sure how to absorb this, since my fiscal leanings are more closely aligned with the right, which would be considered red. Does this make me purple? And if so, what state can I live in?

The second tweaking event was an article in the Washington Post about surveillance cameras being installed in a small town in Bellow Falls, Vt. This is a town where there are eight police officers, two barbershop chairs, one movie screen and not much happening. There wasn't any need for the cameras, but money was forthcoming from the federal government for security measures, and there wasn't much else on which to spend the funds.

Bellow Falls is far from the only small town to install these types of cameras -- all in response to government funds that, if not used, will be withdrawn. Similar scenarios have played out in Galex and Tazewell, Va., as well as Preston, Md. None of these communities had high incidences of crime or any real reason for the camera installations.