“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Given the situation that Solzhenitsyn describes here, I wonder if we might stumble upon the leadership that would make our winning/retaining our freedom possible. And too, I often wonder if many of those assigned the task of destroying the citizenry and what remains of its freedoms might rebel as well. One can only hope.
Sobering words aren’t they?
I’d say it is past time for “officials” to wonder if they will return home at all. They need to understand that there is no such thing as just doing their job or just following orders. Every decision we make must carry with it consideration for the consequences and there must be consequences.
We are governed by consent of the governed. We have let that consent go way too far.