Prescription for Freedom

("We must disenthrall ourselves..."

- Abraham Lincoln) There are words that warn of monotony that chokes the intellect and of "the musty inertia that excludes the transcendent...."1 Words that shock us awake. Now the clean knife of a new freedom cuts through the sinew of pretense, severing offense from offender, sharpening into an urgency that renders the search for comfort obsolete. Dictatorships are crushed by words - not wars. Now no hierarchy ever dares to excommunicate original thought - nor consumerism bleed the heart - as literalism yields to metaphor. When is it words catch fire in the thinker? It's when he's on the threshhold of a new idea - though the media insist he drop it all and go shopping instead! Words are burning in us - words that scorch the corporate lie and prove the swift combustibility of "get." And words that champion self-denial - these cannot be left unwritten or unsaid. Doors swing open. News is history. Suddenly we're living paradox: ideas are turning political irony into poetry and fashioning freedom out of broken locks!

1 Vaclav Havel