Talking About Freedom.

So I had to take the car to the shop today - preventative maintenance only but it was still two hours. While I was there I read something that really made me stop and think.

But the plain truth is, when Anna said she doesn't find this country to be especially free, it was Anna talking. Granted, her complaint is hardly new. People often grouse about the lack of freedom in the land of the free.

But you see, Anna is from Estonia, a former republic of the old Soviet Union. As in the Evil Empire, world's leading exporter of communism.

So when Anna says she feels less free in the United States where she now lives than in the once-totalitarian regime where she was born, well ... it gets your attention. And when she says Americans sometimes remind her of the gray, fatalistic men and women who shuffled along under communism, unwilling to think too deeply, say too much or laugh too loudly for fear of offending the State, it is striking, to say the least...Americans, she said, love to trumpet their freedom. But it's hard to square that with political correctness that straitjackets communication for fear of giving unintended offense, hair-trigger litigiousness that requires major corporations to treat customers ("Caution: Coffee is hot") like idiots for fear of being sued, zero-tolerance policies and mandatory sentencing guidelines that remove human judgment from human encounters for fear of rendering unequal justice.

I really can't add much more other than go read the whole thing. We need to wake up and shake of the shackles of political correctness etc. We need to be able to stand up, speak our minds and if someone insults us we need to be ADULT ENOUGH to deal with it. Otherwise the Republic is doomed.