there's no such thing as a free lunch

Just as an update, this is now my 140th post! We're almost at the halfway mark (only 42 and a half [?] more posts to go . . .)!
By the way, I'm not just saying post because I'm trying to be cool, it's because if I say that this is my 140th blog, than that means I have 140 blogs, not 140 blog entries. But entries sounds like a diary, so I stick to post. So there you go. You learn something new everyday.
Today I'm going to go all philosophical.
Even though in all of my other classes we are doing nothing because school is basically over, we are still going pretty hard-core in history, as if the AP test was tomorrow or something.
We are watching the HBO special on John Adams, but it's more like a movie than a documentary. And sometimes it's pretty graphic (the tar and feathering and the small pox). We've been watching it for three days and I'm starting to wonder if this movie is going to last 90 years (that's how long he lived).
But at the end of the part we watched today, my teacher said that we can't ever know what it's like to not be free, because we've had it all our lives. We were born free, we live free, and nothing ever phases us - well at least nothing like this. How many people do you know think about or talk about the Revoultion or the Founding Fathers? How many people think about what thousands of people died for to give us a basic right?
We don't have to live with foreign military officers patroling our streets. We enjoy the company of each other. We don't live under strict curfews and we don't have to pay unfair taxes to things we have no say in. We live great lives and we don't even know it.
As my teacher says, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." Everything costs something, whether its time, money, or even lives. And we are still living in the wake of the people who died for us. The people who saved something for us. And many of them, while they dedicated their lives to saving the future, never got to see the fruit of their trees.