Posted on 05/31/2014 5:25:39 PM PDT by Wage Slave
I was watching a show last night on the Liberty Channel that featured Dennis Prager. Mr. Prager started talking about the fact that we are much less free now than we were in the past.
He mentioned that he was able to buy cigarettes for his mother when he was 10 years old.
That got me to wondering what other freedoms we've lost that our children will never know about. Maybe it would be a good idea to let them know so they can get an idea of what it means to boil a frog slowly.
In what ways do you think we are less free now?
Bicycle and motorcycle helmets were optional. Actually, I never heard of a bicycle helmet until I was in college or later.
Seat belts.
Be careful taking pictures of landmarks.
Well yea, but that is mostly enforced against employees by Nazi busy-bodies at the school. Kids smoke on the sidewalks off school property. No one bothers them.
Riding in the back of the pickup was the preferred method of transport when I was a kid.
I think in California, even your dog can’t ride in the back of the truck unless tethered.
We did get rid of our helmet law for motorcycles a year or so back.
Its like seatbelts, a good idea doesn’t make a good law.
You have trouble with sarcasm I see.
In high school we took guns to school during hunting season and that was in the 80s.
I’ve definitely noticed the change in the cops in the past 5 to 10 years.
He let me sit in it ... the thing smells like cars used to ... the steering wheel was so skinny ... and there were no seat belts
Used to be able to buy a 22 rifle from an ad in a comic book and it arrived in the mail
A few years back I got a ticket for not having a life jacket in the boat with me.
I am a bicentennial. Gradgitated in ‘76.
Recently I was on a back road in central Virginia and everyone got pulled over by the cops. They were checking for expired stickers or whatever. Very nasty guys. I asked the young one if he felt ok doing this to his fellow citizens and he said yes. I’m lucky they didn’t invent something to charge me with.
We now have a dozen or more different federal agencies monitoring our phone and cell usage, credit card usage, and things that would scare the $hit out of us if we knew the information the govt has on us and trust me, Ive been doing computers for 30 years.
Once a piece of information goes into a govt computer, it NEVER goes out again. They have a bottomless pit of taxpayer dollars to buy all of the backup and storage devices they need to enslave us.
Thanks NSA, DEA, FBI andon and on and on.
Oh yeah, OBAMACARE. THE number of rights we've lost due to this program are incalculable. if the Founding fathers knew that their medical information was given to the govt practically before it was to our pharmacist, they would have started a 2nd revolution before the first one was finished.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
A) You have to buy a health insurance policy as ordered by the government
B) The electricity and other forms of energy are not permitted to be generated from the cheapest, most efficient forms of energy as mandated by the government
C) You must pay for other people’s cell phones as mandated by a tax on your cell phone as ordered by the government
D) Your freedom of religion is trumped by the civil rights of a self-identified member of a non-race and you must provide services as ordered by the judicial system
E) The refrigerant in your air conditioner must be a far less efficient chemical than it used to be based on false science as ordered by the government to keep a molecule of O3 from disappearing even though this molecule is created by the sun and could never be destroyed
F) You cannot order a size of a beverage of your choosing as it is now illegal as mandated by the government
This could go on for a while, and I have clearly stuck to the premise that the limits on freedom are imposed by the government.
In all honesty, is this a rhetorical question anyway?
A few years ago, much was made of Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation. We also had the Saving Private Ryan mini-series. Both reminded us of the tremendous character and strengths of the people who fought and won WW2.
In time, those GIs were cashiered and resumed civilian lives.
If you want some eye-opening responses, the next time you are at some public event where asking a crowd some questions would be possible, ask something like this:
“You recall that the generation that came home from WW2 was called the Greatest Generation because they defeated totalitarian governments of the Imperial Japanese and the German Nazis. Would you like to be as free as those soldiers were when they came back to civilian life?”
When I have done this and every time I most often get the most puzzled looks. People frequently hesitate and then say no. When asked why, they often say, “because someone might do something”, by which I speculate that “something” is something they might not approve of.
For greater effect, cast this question as: would you like to be as free as the generation of soldiers who came home from the Civil War.
The hidden issue here is that the further you go back in time to draw the line, the smaller the role of government in suppressing liberty. But a lot of people are not so familiar with the history of the Welfare State and this is an end run around their reflexive defense of that intrusion in private lives and in the expansion of government.
Well I was a teenager in NYC in the 1970s and we smoked everywhere and we pretty much smoked pot everywhere.
Say it was bad, but it was more freedom than we have today, living in a nanny state that’s right on the verge of being a nanny from hell state at best.
We even had jokes and stuff.
I miss those days, I’d go back in a heartbeat.
Yeah, seat belts.
Last year I got pulled over by a Maryland state trooper. He told me I didn’t have my seatbelt on. I showed him that I did, in fact, have it buckled around my hips but that I had tucked my arm underneath the shoulder portion due to pain from a shoulder injury. He asked me if I had a note from my doctor that allowed me to tuck my arm underneath the belt.
It was all I could do not to laugh, but he was a deadly serious jackboot.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.