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Are Americans Afraid of Freedom?

Posted on 04/30/2012 9:01:02 AM PDT by pinochet

After the September 11 2001 attacks, the only thing that the government needed to do to prevent future attacks was to reinforce airline cockpit doors, and to toughen visa restrictions on foreigners coming to America. Foreign nationals living within America should also have been subjected to tougher vetting. The Patriot Act was not necessary, and American citizens did not deserve to lose their freedoms. In 2001, Republicans never expected a socialist like Obama to come to office, and they allowed the Bush administration to take as much power as it wanted from the American people.

The greatest mistake that the American people made after 9-11, was to demand that the federal government provide them a 100 percent guarantee, that they would never be attacked again by foreign terrorists. The only country in the world, that can give its citizens a 100 percent guarantee that they will never be attacked by foreign terrorists, is North Korea. Every foreign visitor to North Korea has to be accompanied by a government minder, during the time that he stays in North Korea, so that he can be supervised 24 hours a day. It is completely impossible for a foreign terrorist to carry out an attack in North Korea, because he is being watched 24 hours a day. But the citizens of North Korea are being watched 24 hours a day, as well. Do we want America to be as "safe" from foreign terrorists, as North Korea?

The price that Americans have to pay in order to be free, is to live with some risk. We have to remember that, when Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia outlawed the private ownership of guns, those nations had some of the lowest rates of street crime in the world. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were more effective in enforcing gun control than New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. So successful were they, that even the street criminals found it hard to get guns (You are going to tell me that their governments became criminal organizations that kept lesser criminals in check, and you are right).

Are Americans willing to accept the premise that, a free society is one that comes with some risk?


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Government; Philosophy; Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: america; bloggersandpersonal; foundingfathers; freedom; vanity
We have to deal with the fact that freedom is very scary. In the old America, when young people turned 18, they left their parents' homes full of fear and apprehension over how they were going to make it living on their own. But they were able to overcome their fear, and step out into the world.

Today, many Americans who are 25 years and older are still living with their parents, because their parents are afraid of the risks that their 25 year olds will encounter, when they go out into the world.

The people of today are more fearful than they were in the past, which explains why we have become a nanny state. A fearful people cannot be free. The founding fathers of this country were willing to live with risk. In the Revolutionary War, they were literary gambling with their lives. If they had lost the war, as Benjamin Franklin reminded them, King George III of England would have hanged them all.

1 posted on 04/30/2012 9:01:11 AM PDT by pinochet
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To: pinochet
Speaking for myself in my 30's, I could never move back in with mom and pa unless they needed my help. My dad and I didn't get along when I lived there. We get along great now. I was never good with authority.
2 posted on 04/30/2012 9:10:04 AM PDT by Darren McCarty (The Republican Party is bigger than the presidency.)
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To: pinochet

Too many Americans aren’t afraid of liberty but rather fear a major component of liberty: RISK.


3 posted on 04/30/2012 9:18:02 AM PDT by Le Chien Rouge
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To: pinochet

“People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.” — Ben Franklin


4 posted on 04/30/2012 9:34:50 AM PDT by ClearCase_guy (Like Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin has become simply a stick with which to beat Whites.)
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To: pinochet

Almost 75% of them are afraid of freedom. In my opinion at least.

Ask how many Americans would phase out SS and Medicare for those under 25 years old. Make it voluntary to participate.

This should be a reliable gauge of if people value freedom over nanny state security and taxes taken at the point of a gun by their government for the common good.


5 posted on 04/30/2012 9:45:27 AM PDT by listenhillary (Courts, law enforcement, roads and national defense should be the extent of government)
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To: pinochet
Are Americans Afraid of Freedom?

Quite frankly, many are. Oh they want unlimited freedom of choice with respect to trivialities and entertainment - Net Flix, iTunes, and ethnic foods - but they want to concede to Government their health care, finances, retirement, and standard of living.

6 posted on 04/30/2012 10:18:20 AM PDT by Rummyfan (Iraq: it's not about Iraq anymore, it's about the USA!)
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To: pinochet

Devo - Freedom of Choice

A victim of collision on the open sea
Nobody ever said that life was free
Sank, swam, go down with the ship
But use your freedom of choice

I’ll say it again in the land of the free
Use your freedom of choice
Your freedom of choice

In ancient Rome
There was a poem
About a dog
Who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom of choice!

Then if you got it you don’t want it
Seems to be the rule of thumb
Don’t be tricked by what you see
You got two ways to go

I’ll say it again in the land of the free
Use your freedom of choice
Freedom of choice

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom of choice!

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want!


7 posted on 04/30/2012 10:22:46 AM PDT by dfwgator (Don't wake up in a roadside ditch. Get rid of Romney.)
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To: pinochet

It seems that most Americans have traded their Liberties for pretense of security.


8 posted on 04/30/2012 10:31:54 AM PDT by GingisK
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To: GingisK
It seems that most Americans have traded their Liberties for pretense of security.

And they will have neither.

9 posted on 04/30/2012 10:35:47 AM PDT by dfwgator (Don't wake up in a roadside ditch. Get rid of Romney.)
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To: pinochet

Of course Americans aren’t afraid of freedom. So long as it constitutes the freedom to:

1. Access every available freebie and benefit on the taxpayers’ dime.
2. Set up camps in city parks, stink up the place and defecate on cars.
3. Smoke, snort or shoot up any drug they want.
4. Eschew reproductive reponsibility by getting government-paid abortions, OR churn out babies from multiple “baby daddies” and suck up welfare dollars.
5. Park their lazy asses in their parents’ basement and bitch on websites about how the “greedy 1%” won’t hire them with their BS-Gender Studies degrees, in between episodes of “Jerry Springer.”


10 posted on 04/30/2012 11:03:37 AM PDT by ScottinVA (Buying Drain-O requires photo I.D... so should voting!)
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To: dfwgator
And they will have neither.

By the time they figure this out, it will be TOO LATE. This will occur sooner than later, I fear.

11 posted on 04/30/2012 11:14:02 AM PDT by GingisK
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To: pinochet

I don’t believe it’s freedom people are afraid of - it’s personal responsibility.

The pipe-dream the Left sells to liberals is that they can be free without personal responsibility. That they can have an andless, spoiled childhood if they let the State be their parent, and that in turn, that parent will indulge their cruelest whims.

And look at what the Left actually does when it’s in power - just that. Whether government, corporate, educational or religious, when the Left is in power, it has only one question - are you loyal, or not? If you are loyal, you can do no wrong. Your most egregious violations of morality and law and simply ignored. But if you are not loyal, you are shunned and destroyed.

By starting in the schools at and early age, and by training soccer moms to reproduce this absolute tyranny in their homes (while rewarding the soccer moms for doing it, of course) - and by fueling everything with antidepressent drugs to numb the conscience - we’ve reached a perfect storm of baseness in America. Of foul-mouthed, destructive, hypocritical, snarling beasts called liberals, who neither care nor understand politics or anything else, but act solely upon the commands of their groups leaders, feeling no shame while living conscienceless lives of perversion, selfishness, greed and hate.

It’s a spiritual battle of a moral extreme perhaps never seen before on this planet. And if this isn’t the end times, it’s giving a damn good impersonation of it.


12 posted on 04/30/2012 11:20:29 AM PDT by Talisker (He who commands, must obey.)
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