Free Air

Stand Together and Fight for freedom’s oxygen and the life it enhances

Free Air



Recently, one of my publishers, a man I admire, had a health scare. Both he and I share several things: a love for our God, our families, our fellow man and our country. We also share a health diagnosis of Congestive-Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).



Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a lung disease characterized by chronic obstruction of lung airflow that interferes with normal breathing… The more familiar terms ‘chronic bronchitis’ and ‘emphysema’ … are now included within the COPD diagnosis. COPD is not simply a “smoker’s cough” but an under-diagnosed, life-threatening lung disease.  (World Health Organization)

It’s a very scary thing to find you’re fighting for the very fundamental right and ability to breathe. Anxiety is irrational. It’s very much primal. The fear of suffocation sets your survival drive in motion. You fight anything you perceive will stop your pulling more air in to stop your fear of suffocating. It’s a circuitous action makes things difficult. The nurse wants you to wear the oxygen mask to allow you to get more oxygen to starving tissue and you see the plastic mask as a barrier to you getting more oxygen. Result: you pull the mask off of and away from your face until you either pass out (not a good thing at all) or they restrain your hands until you really go ballistic as I do and have done.



It’s because breathing is natural we fight so hard to do it. But we do it for a reason we’ve mistaken for a long time. We don’t breathe IN so much to gain oxygen (we’re going to do that with each breath) as much as we breathe OUT to expel Carbon Dioxide (CO2). One nourishes. The other poisons our systems. CO2 is mildly acidic when measured in standard ways. But, when CO2 accumulates in cell structures it burns the cell surface and the connective walls causing a breakdown of the cell’s ability to transfer oxygen in and CO2 out. The cell is damaged and possibly killed. It’s that Yin and Yan thing of homeostasis (physiological balance) thing determines how we’ll live and for how much longer.

This causes a decrease in efficient O2 absorption. We can chronically suffer the symptoms: chronic cough bringing up mucus from the lungs, shortness of breath (especially with exercise), repeated and sometimes severe COPD flare-ups, potential weight loss, blue skin color, especially in the lips, fingers, and toes (cyanosis), fluid buildup in the legs and feet (edema) (WebMD)

We must control our exertion levels or the quality of life is severely diminished.

We’re accustomed to breathing the “free” air of patriotic Americanism. (For you kind people not enjoying these freedoms, I feel sorry for you.) We’re free men and women in this nation. We have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have the right to control and direct the conduct of government. We have the right of protest and the right to petition for redress of grievances for wrongs committed against us by government. And, we have the right to tear down and reconstruct that government that violates our rights with precocious, pretentious and whimsical legislation sucking the air from us and acidly eroding the native liberties associated with being an American.

When the erosion of American rights by corrupted, self-serving politicians acting as power-hungry oligarchs are understood we feel we’re being suffocated. When politicians try placing barriers between us and freedom’s oxygen, we become anxious. We resist efforts to impose selected treatments because they’re based on the need for the medic (politician) to appear to know best what should be done (to appear qualified) and the patient who no longer trusts anybody not assured to be doing the right thing. You can’t make me trust a honeyed-tongue and promises you have a history of NOT making come true.

My friend and I will recover. It’s the American people’s right to fight off and dismiss any and all efforts to suck the air out of OUR Constitution, OUR Bill of Rights and OUR freedoms guaranteed by both.

Stand Tall. Stand Firm. Stand Together and Fight for freedom’s oxygen and the life it enhances.