This United States is not the United States I was a little girl in. That's all I'm saying about the matter.
Fear is the tool that is always used to take freedom apart. If you can gin up enough fear in people, you don't have to take freedom away, they will hand it to you. Beware anyone peddling fear.
Make people afraid and then convince them that you and only you have the means to keep them safe from the non-existent or overblown threat(s) that you have concocted or distorted and you've got them in your pocket. As long as they think they need you to protect them you are in charge and they'll sacrifice their own if you claim that it's necessary for the cause.
Sounds eerily like BO's class warfare appeals and his attempts to persuade people that he knows what's best for them, doesn't it? I'm talking about this new Consumer Affairs Bureau by the way.
I would be glad if you would take your fight with Moen somewhere else rather than trying to hijack this thread. Maybe we could have a dedicated pinned thread for it off in a corner somewhere so anyone who was interested would know where to go.
Well it beats talking aobut the op I suppose since the Republican faction has been as guilty as the Democratic faction in trampling on the Constitution and to actually discuss the issue would necessarily involve criticism of the Holy Elephant and well as of the Donkey. Much more comfortable to simply use this as another venue to pursue whatever personal vendetta you have against this member or that.
Few people even know what freedom is. The majority of us don't even want to think of what it means to be free, settling on a semblance of it, a comfortable compromise between having others tell us what to do and deciding for ourselves what's best for ourselves. We've settled out of fear, the fear of death in a dangerous World, as well as the fear of the unknown. Your point probably has more to do with a third fear though, the fear of prosecution. No one wants the State against them, and so when the State says some of our freedoms need to be limited in order to protect us from that dangerous World that wants us dead, we tend to settle for the new rules too.
This is a lot of it. I think the Founders would have appalled by what's going on now. The world they faced was much more threatening and dangerous and far less manageable than what we face now. They had a tiny weak newly-minted independent country of sorts facing internal disunion and major league enemies on every side and yet they managed to institute the very freedoms for the people that we are now tossing overboard in the interest of security and safety.
I don't believe Americans understand what a miracle we live in. I'm not going to go into the matter of wealth, but just how well everything works. If we pick up a phone and dial a number, we get who we're calling. This is rare in the world. I've spent half a day trying to make a call from one side of a third world city to the other side of the same town and never got through. When we mail a letter we can be confident that it will actually be delivered. Often not the case in other countries. We complain about the police but we don't have to fear them as is so common elsewhere. And we have legal recourse, also rare. There is much still wrong here and we shouldn't get lazy about confronting this, but this is, really and by far, the best country in the world for its citizens.
