If you were to be set #free after serving 27 years in prison. Your supporters an entire nation gather around you to listen to what you have to say in decades... when your only crime was to oppose a minority regime. Those who imprisoned you, are next to you too. What would you say?
“I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy, and freedom for all.” — an excellent 71-year-old Nelson Mandela said.
He addressed the very same people who jailed him and who had repressed fellow blacks to preach “true reconciliation.” Nelson Mandela always felt free, even if physically was kept behind bars for nearly three decades.
Archbishop and also freedom fighter Desmond Tutu said: “He came out a far greater person than the man who went in.”
Most of us would have felt furious and full of revengeful feelings. We’d probably cursed that unfair system and wished to take them down. But Mandela did not do that. He learned that “courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”
Your freedom ends where someone else’s starts.
In the USA many citizens think that freedom equals to doing whatever they please — freedom is a belief above any moral law. Some people actually believe it’s correct to attack others in the name of liberty. They turn freedom defence into an excuse. But imposing one’s beliefs is ideological slavery.
Nelson Mandela said: “To be free is not only to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
You are free to think whatever you desire. But out of order actitudes, just to win a discussion, will make you a hostage of some others’ approval. Whatever you believe imprisons you, as I wrote here.
Freedom is more than the right to speak up — knowing when to stay silent sets you free.
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