The Land of the Free
by Rosalind Foley on 07/06/13
This Fourth of July a memory came to me that made me newly grateful for the freedom writers in our country take as an inalienable right.
Only a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall I spent a week in the former East Germany as the guest of a West German publisher who was there trying to bring their newspaper up to western standards. It was slow slogging, as the local staff was wary of even expressing an opinion, accustomed as they were to being told what to think and say under the Communist regime.
During that week I met a writer, probably in his thirties, who had not been allowed to publish his novel. Not only had his work been confiscated and suppressed, but from then on he had been harassed by the powerful Stasi state police. The defeat on his face haunts me still.
'Lest we forget.
God bless America.
