Mike Pence Booed and Lectured

When Mike Pence was booed and lectured to at Hamilton, he gracefully smiled and told his children "that's the sound of freedom."  But even though he is a public servant, shouldn't he be granted freedom to take his family to a play without being lectured or booed? Doesn't he deserve to be respected, especially in the presence of his children? When we are "in your face" with what we are free to do, freedom morphs into something I'm not proud to send my son off to war to defend and protect. This "freedom" is arrogant, impolite, entitled. It's the "freedom" that sows seeds of hostility and conflict--the stuff that makes freedom untenable. And there are certainly more extreme examples of this arrogance in recent American history. The freedom that we love, the freedom that enhances the quality of human life, is freedom that is self-restrained. It is restrained by love, mutual respect and humility. It is bold when necessary, like Martin Luther King, Jr.'s version. But we see in the Civil Rights movement, that tension between restrained and unrestrained freedom. Oppression builds up an energy that takes great discipline to restrain, and great courage to confront. Freedom requires both that courage and that restraint. Also, prosperity tends to breed entitlement and immaturity; traits that have historically preceded societal decline. Democracy is a fragile state of human existence. It is an out-of-balance condition when looked at from the worldwide historical perspective. It is somewhat of a glorious anomaly. And it can only be maintained by a psycho-spiritually mature populace. Our Founding Fathers, though imperfect as all men, seemed to realize this fragility, setting up a system with balanced power--a form of self-restraint. And not only providing freedom from state oppression of religion, but encouraging religion [the primary venue of psycho-spiritual maturity]. In fact, democracy is arguably a corollary of [result of] the psycho-spiritual maturity of a people who were willing to fight for religious liberty and who were determined enough  to endure grave hardships to flee religious oppression.  Let us hope that this stamina still exists in the prosperity and obesity of our democratic republic.  The most important foundation of democracy is  healthy religion; the Christian Faith of our Founding Fathers. This Faith must never be imposed, but its repression is a grave symptom of the decline of all freedoms, and the rise of authoritarianism.