Freedom isn't just a word or an idea. It's a baseline, a benchmark, the beginning of the world we want to be. Freedom is the language in which the 21st Century social contract is written, the communication method that must frame all modern human interaction in order to make any of it valuable. It's the conclusion of the path leading to a future without limit, and the required foundation upon which cogito ergo sum stands. We are what we believe ourselves to be. We think therefore we are.

However, to think, to actively consider ourselves and the world we inhabit, we must, all of us, be free. Free to believe and disagree and discover and reconcile and adjust and, above all else, live. Freedom must never be pursued or even considered in spite of death or oppression or blind, ragged stupidity. Freedom isn't a response to the imprisonment of people, it's the central precondition for human life. Its flawless necessity renders it natural and vice versa. Freedom is perhaps the simplest concept to be understood, but it will never be the easiest to protect. Freedom requires you to forever actively manufacture safety across the deepest centre of a society for those at its furthermost edges.

It's been said that justice is what love looks like in public. Without freedom, though, both ideas would cease to be, since freedom is how we're able to recognise love, and freedom is the reason why justice matters.

It's the lens through which tomorrow must be viewed. Let's keep on cleaning it, let's continue to make it clearer every single day. Through freedom's truth we are free to do so and, for freedom's sake, that's why we must.

– Thaao Dill