Collegiate Times

Editor's note: Sophomore Holly Kays is the winner of the First Amendment Week Contest.

In comparison to the more trivial things in life, I rarely think about my freedoms of religion, speech, or of the press; I honestly don't spend much time contemplating my right to assemble or to petition the government. However, even though these freedoms don't often surface in my thoughts, I exercise them daily. In classes I say and write what I believe, never once fearing the shadowy terror of a hostile government. I go to church and share my faith openly, knowing no reason why I should hide it. I have gathered with other Americans to express my strongly held views and have signed petitions without  worrying about who sees my name written there.

The truth is that in today's world, America's most basic foundations have become barely visible undercurrents in the ocean of the everyday. The ideals expressed in the First Amendment precipitated the drama of our past, yet that drama has become little more than a clich in the modern America. To children sitting in school, the Revolutionary War appears to be little more than an unnecessary barrier between them and recess, and adults would often rather complain about perceived infringements on their rights than think about the sacrifice by which they inherited them.

In contrast, 233 years ago the hunger for these rights was so strong that it exploded on the commons of Lexington, Mass., in "the shot heard round the world." Tired of being told that heritage determines human worth and that pyramid-style social hierarchy is the only way to organize the world, a ragtag army of farmers and tradesmen stood in defiance of these dominant ideas. They replaced the normal order of society with a dream of a country in which everyone, regardless of parentage, would be considered equal under the law.

This concept was revolutionary in the 18th-century environment; a mere seven years earlier, Polish aristocrats had held the power of life and death over their serfs, and many Western European countries still required peasants to tithe their harvests to the parish priests. Indeed, it must have been a blow to the comfort of European aristocracy when a militia of untrained and under-equipped colonists defeated the best army in the world. "How could this happen?" they must have wondered, disbelieving. The colonists, in the eyes of the European elite, were little better than peasants. They simply couldn't have outdone the polished British army.

But they did -- 4,500 deaths, 6,200 wounds, and innumerable frostbitten feet later, America became the first democratic nation in the world. For the Americans of the 1770s, freedom was earned rather than inherited, and First Amendment rights were written vividly through painful experience, not memorized grudgingly in concrete classrooms. Generations have passed since then, and prosperity has lulled America into sleepy security, an unconscious certainty that our freedoms will always be there, waiting to be used. It is easy to rest on the sacrifices of our ancestors, relying on what has been to determine what will be.

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