Cherish my freedom: Citation essay award winner Published June 30, 2010 By Senior Airman Kevin Sanchez 966th Airborne Air Control SquadronFreedom Citation Award Winner TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- Freedom is the right to enjoy all the privileges or special rights of citizenship, and membership. With me being the first generation from my family born in the United States, I hold this definition very close to my heart. Both of my parents emigrated from Bolivia about 30 years ago in the hope of achieving freedom. My parents are from a poor city in Bolivia, and their thought about freedom was a financial and educational type of freedom for themselves and their children. With all the hard work that they did since being here and also living in one of the toughest places in the states to try and make it, they did in Queens, N.Y. My sister and I came about eight years later and we were automatically blessed with having these freedoms. Although we sometimes took our parents for granted and thought we needed more than we had, my parents would take us back to where they came from to show us how much we should be grateful for and how much some people suffered to have the simple things in life. As time passed, my sister and I got better, but on one special day our freedom was taken away for a short period of time. On Sept. 11, 2001, after watching the second plane hit the Twin Towers, my school was forced to be on lock down in a shelter. My mother was working about 10 blocks away from the World Trade Center and saw the people running through the streets getting away from the falling buildings. To avoid being trampled she stayed in her office until the chaos calmed. I was stuck in school and not allowed to leave until an adult could sign me out. I tried to contact my mother all day with no luck. My dad left early from his job to meet my mom as she crossed the bridge out of the city. Manhattan was locked down so no one could enter or exit and my mom had to walk, showing her I.D. on the way out. That day everything I had been accustomed too had been taken away, my freedom. Then in July 2003 I enlisted in the military to do my part, to keep something like that from happening again. Thankfully I deployed in 2007 for the first time to the Middle East to find the people that took away the freedom from those of us in New York. Freedom to me changed on that day, but it has saddened me that it took an act of terrorism to make people realize the freedom we have and to not take it for granted. Freedom is a blessing to have and we all need to treat it as such.