Dear Children,

Consider this quote from a philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” 5
What does this mean? Is freedom good? Should we be sad if we are no longer free, but like slaves, we are in chains?
A free person, children, can speak what he thinks. His or her thoughts are their own, and they do not get influenced by bad people and made to think what they want you to think. We do what we want when we are free. We should not hurt anybody as we freely follow the truths and beauties of life despite what friends, families, the people on television, teachers, or anyone else may think or try to convince us to act or think for their own selfish purposes. It doesn’t mean we won’t listen or consider the opinions of others. Just that we ultimately decide for ourselves what we think and how we want to act. Without mind control, a free person can explore and discover what they truly want and want to be. We might have to be brave as we stand tall for our freedom. Sometimes, such people are ridiculed because they don’t fit in with all the other conformists who are too afraid to be different. But their laughter is really a reflection of their own insecurities.
There are other ways a man or woman can have their freedoms taken away. Nelson Mandela, a South African politician, was arrested in his country because he stood up against the laws of apartheid, which were laws put in place that

5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1762, The Social Contract.

banned black people from participating in normal, ordinary human activities, like sitting in the front seats of public events, or using public toilets where white people were. Because he protested this and fought against the South African legal structure which upheld these laws, they took his freedoms away, and he was arrested for 27 years and put in jail. He lived in a room for 27 years no bigger than a small bathroom in your house. His freedoms were inhumanely taken away! Was he defeated by the bad apartheid government? No, children! When he was released from jail 27 years later, Nelson Mandela was as strong as ever. He continued in politics in his country and became the country’s first black president for a whole five year term at age 84! They tried to take his freedom of thought, his will to survive, to break his stand on justice by torture and by putting him into a small, tiny space, lacking none of the freedoms of movement, fresh air, the sight of streets, the ability to see friends as he wished, to go to sports games, to go to the shopping mall. Yet a sacred and profound freedom was preserved, the freedom to think on his own terms. And later, when physically free, he acted on that wealth of freedom and made the world stand on guard to every word he spoke. Nelson Mandela showed that freedom is a state of mind and soul.
Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist, who was in the concentration camps, saw the deaths of thousands of his people at the hands of the Nazis. Some prisoners gave up, some acted like the guards who inflicted pain and humiliation on the prisoners due to psychological defense mechanisms trying to cope. Others, however, coped by some miraculous miracle. They were free, despite living worse than stray dogs foraging in a wired fence cage:
According to Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”6 In other words, we have a mind that can allow us to freely be in charge of our behavior, thoughts, and feelings in any kind of situation so that we are not really forced by even the worst situations to respond in a certain way, but instead, we can always control our responses by our inner world.
Being free is one of the most important ways of being alive. Be careful of those who try to send false images in the cave of life. Be careful of those who try to defeat your hope or your faith or who tell you things that are not true. Use your eyes and your ears and see into the soul of those who would lie and deceive you. For when your mind is not accurate and your thoughts are being controlled by others, or by corporations, by wrong beliefs, by politicians, it may be possible to be chained to the untruth, and you would not be free to know reality. How can you be free if you do not know reality or the truth? Even Nelson Mandela, imprisoned in a tiny cell, was free to know right and wrong, and though in one sense, he was not free to go outside whenever he wanted, he was free in his mind, which in this case was the only real freedom, the one worth fighting for with all his mind, heart, and soul.