The exchange between Chad and Roy made me look at the speech again.
President Bush put freedom from fear as the third “great responsibility
to our children and grandchildren.”
“First, we must be good
stewards of this economy, and renew the great institutions on which
millions of our fellow citizens rely.” This includes making the economy
more flexible and shrinking the federal government, in addition to HSAs
and personalized Social Security. Second, “honor and to pass along the
values that sustain a free society.” The freedom from fear in the SOTU
was an active reformulation of FDR’s passive fourth freedom
(behind freedom from want). For FDR, freedom from fear meant making
others weak through disarmament; for Bush, it means maintaining our
strength.
By the time I was in high school, Reagan had turned
our fear to courage-we were no longer in fallout shelters or hiding
under desks in school. As Mark Twain said: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear?not absence of fear.”
