Freedom must be passed from generation to generation to remain strong, Baroness Caroline Cox told an America's Freedom Festival audience Friday.
"It is so important that we never take it for granted and also that we encourage our younger generation . . . not to take their freedom for granted," said Lady Cox, who received an award from the festival's officials.Since she was appointed a lifelong peer of the British House of Lords in 1982, Lady Cox has been at the forefront of delivering humanitarian aid through Christian Solidarity International, an organization that targets suffering throughout the world.
She was introduced by Gaylord K. Swim, chairman of the Sutherland Institute.
Like the phrase, "charity begins at home," Lady Cox said, clarity regarding freedom also begins at home.
"I think that if we have to work for the preservation and the promotion of freedom, we have to make sure that those principles of freedom are enshrined and are in families, are in schools and are in communities," she said.
Illiteracy among children and censorship on campuses are two things impacting Britain and posing a threat to freedom, she said. However, Britain is trying to solve these problems.
Lady Cox said literacy is a fundamental of freedom because it gives individuals the freedom to develop their own lives.
"A loss of freedom anywhere diminishes our own freedom," she said.
Lady Cox has personally delivered supplies by truck to devastated areas of Poland, the former Soviet Union and Armenia.
"We would go through the neat Netherlands, affluent West Germany and then - every time the sight would make my blood run cold - we hit the Iron Curtain," she said of one drive to Poland in the 1980s.
On this same trip, when dropping off supplies, her truck driver suddenly became fearful because he found two boxes of blank paper among the supplies.
"Don't you realize in a country like this that blank paper is dangerous; you can write ideas upon it," a Polish doctor told Lady Cox later that night.