If You Can Keep It, Part 1: Freedom Isn’t Free

What a free country costs

This time of year, the flags start going up on porches and in front yards, but for 2026, the celebration of our country carries a little more weight. Two hundred and fifty years to be precise. There will be fireworks and cookouts and more red, white, and blue than you can shake a stick at, and I would not skip a minute of it. But do we really know what we are celebrating, and what it takes to keep our nation free?

Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote a piece this spring on America at two hundred and fifty that brings to light things most Americans no longer even notice about our country. And he uses the opportunity to remind us of what we should be thankful for. 

We have the largest economy in the world. Most of the best universities are within our borders. Our military has no equal. Our music and our movies turn up in countries most of us will never set foot in. The U.S. Constitution is the oldest written national constitution still in force and has outlasted nearly every government established after 1789. We were built without kings or inherited titles, a place where what you can do counts far more than who your ancestors were, and where a surprising number of our biggest companies were started by people who showed up here with next to nothing in their pockets.

All of this is worth celebrating!

But Hanson does not stop at the good news. He gives all Americans a warning. It is the enemy of complacency. What worries Hanson is not an army across the ocean. It is the fear that a nation this prosperous, if it loses faith and duty to one another, will become soft. He also fears we will forget not only that our freedom came at a great cost, but that we carry the responsibility to protect our freedom for the next generation. 

Money can fool people into thinking freedom takes care of itself, but keeping a country free requires continued work. The Bible discusses this in Deuteronomy 8 when God warned His people that the real danger was not an enemy army but the prosperity they were about to encounter. God used hardship to teach dependence as the Israelites traveled through the desert for 40 years. Then prosperity came as they entered the Promised Land. But before entering, Moses warns the people that forgetting where our blessings come from will lead to decline. Not because the people were lazy, but because prosperity can make people spiritually complacent. This is what Victor Hanson is referencing.

Justice Clarence Thomas made a similar point during a speech at the University of Texas. The Declaration, he reminded us, is not a museum piece to admire from behind glass. It is a promise, and a promise is something that must be kept by somebody in every generation that follows the one behind it. Just like a relay race, no matter how well the runner before us carried the baton, when handed to us, if we drop it, the entire team loses. 

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, he said what the world had not had the courage to say. During Justice Thomas’ speech, he did not pretend that the American record is spotless. He brought up Plessy versus Ferguson, the ruling that put its stamp of approval on segregation and on the Jim Crow South he grew up in, and he said it should not have taken his own court almost sixty years to admit how wrong it was.

He did not state these facts to run our country down, but he was showing what it looks like when citizens choose the easy way over the right way, when decent people decide it is safer to stay home and stay quiet. What Thomas asked of us instead was to act with courage. Not heroics out of a movie, but the type of courage where ordinary people stand up for what this country claims to believe, even when standing will cost them something.

No one built this country because it was the comfortable choice. The men who put their names on the Declaration were signing away their own lives, and yet they willingly did so. The soldiers who froze through that winter at Valley Forge were just boys, cold and hungry, with no promise that their sacrifice would mean anything. But they still fought. I cannot read about those men without thinking of the verse where Jesus says there is no greater love than to lay down your life for your friends (John 15:13). These young soldiers laid down their lives for generations of Americans they would never know. They were willing to sacrifice everything for us. 

There is something very biblical underneath all of this, and Victor Hanson alludes to it. Just because you are allowed to do a “thing” does not mean the “thing” is good for you. Most of us were raised on scripture and were taught that being free is not the same as doing whatever you please in the moment. We were taught that with freedom came responsibility. 

A country is not held together one day a year on the Fourth of July. It is held together every day, by ordinary people. We pass along what it takes to remain free by first teaching those around our dinner table about the sacrifices others made. It is our duty to explain this to our children and show them what it takes to keep our freedom.

Deuteronomy 6 reminds us that every generation must intentionally teach the next what is true, good, and worthy of preservation. The freedoms we cherish as Americans are not self-sustaining; they endure only when children learn the virtues that support them, which are faith, responsibility, gratitude, service, and love of neighbor. The home is the first classroom of citizenship, and around the family table, children learn not only how to live, but why freedom is worth protecting. If we hope to keep our nation free, the work begins not in Washington, but in our homes.

People often ask me, “But what can I do to make a difference in our country?” Two things. First, protect the family table and use those moments to teach your children that this country is worth protecting, and freedom was never free. Secondly, teach them that they must vote. That second lesson is how we fulfill the first lesson. Voting is how an ordinary person makes their voice heard. It is the only action step most of us can take.

I love life and love people, and there is little that makes me angry, but when I hear someone say they did not have the time to vote, my feathers ruffle. I hear excuses range from they had to work, to they were too tired to get to the polls. I do not say out loud what I am thinking, but I will say it here. Stand over a grave in a veteran’s cemetery, the grave of someone who died so that all of us could have a voice in our country and say out loud as you look at that tombstone, “I’m sorry, but I just didn’t have time to vote.” I genuinely believe the words would not come. When we visually internalize the sacrifice others have made for us, our hearts change, for the better.

I say this not to throw stones, as I, too, have been guilty of this same laziness. This same comfort of thinking I do not need to vote. But then I imagine my dad, a Korean War veteran, who is buried in Houston Veterans Administration Cemetery (today known as the Houston National Cemetery). I imagine standing at his grave and trying to justify why I just couldn’t get to the polls. This internal conversation I have with myself whips me into shape every time. 

We have drifted too far from understanding what it takes to keep a country free, and each family has a responsibility to teach the next generation the sacrifices we must make. It is not hard, and we do not need to have all the answers, but we do need to stand up and speak. Because if we don’t, someone else will, and it may not be the message we want our children to learn.

The people who came before us did not hand this country to us so we could coast. They entrusted it to us to be stewards for the next generation. I only pray we are worthy of their sacrifice. 

Together with you,

Lisa Lou

A quick note on the art. The watercolors in this series are images I created with AI. I tried photographs, but they felt too sterile for what these pieces are about, so I made something warmer and more nostalgic instead. I hope you enjoy them.

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