Freedom and Responsibility learned from the Pilgrims

I often reinforce my philosophies of freedom through the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). I just read a marvelous article there entitled Our First Thanksgiving.

Some excerpts from the article:
On Thanksgiving Day we are asked to remember what Edmund Burke, in one of the most eloquent phrases to be found in all literature, described as that "little speck, scarce visible in the mass of national interest, a small seminal principle, rather than a formed body" -- the tiny vessel, more accurately to be described as a "cockleshell," the Mayflower, and its hundred passengers, men, women, and children, who sailed on her.Twelve years earlier, in 1608, they had fled from religious persecution in England and established a new home in Holland. Despite the warm welcome extended by the Dutch, as contrasted with the persecutions they had endured in England, their love for their homeland impelled them to seek English soil on which to raise their children, English soil on which they would be free to worship God in their own way. Finally, the Pilgrims landed, as we all know, on Plymouth Rock in the middle of December 1620, and on Christmas Day, in the words of Governor William Bradford, they "began to erect the first house for common use to receive them and their goods." So was established the first English colony in New England.

Three years later, when the plentiful harvest of 1623 had been gathered in, the Pilgrims "set apart a day of thanksgiving." But what of the intervening years?.....

This Thanksgiving Day, let us, each in his own way, humbly ask forgiveness for the degree to which we have all violated the great “seminal principle,” either directly, or through tolerating its violation by others. Then, this Thanksgiving Day, let us highly resolve to dedicate our lives, as individuals, to “planting for our own particular,” rather than living as parasites on the productive energy of others; let us dedicate our lives to a renewed application of the ideal of individual freedom and individual responsibility, which our Pilgrim forebears learned at such sacrifice, and which they passed down to us as our most precious heritage.