Commenting on Comments and Surrendering

Earlier today, I saw a relatively innocuous post on a social media site inciting multiple angry comments and heated exchanges.  Nothing new there, of course.  The post was just a picture of a sign in front of a business that read, "The freedoms you surrender today are the freedoms your grandchildren will never know existed."  

The number of angry comments under that picture, asking "what freedoms has anyone ever lost in this country?" blew my mind.  These people were incredulous.  They had no idea what they'd already lost.

Here are a few freedoms I can list, just off of the top of my head, which have gone the way of the Woolly Mammoth in the Good Ole' U S of A since my Grandaddy's time:

The freedom to keep all the fruits of your labor.  There was no income tax when my Grandfather was born.  He was 23 when the 16th amendment passed, allowing an income tax.  There are senior adults alive today who don't know they've lost that freedom.

The freedom to travel.  When my Grandfather was born, there were no driver's licenses or license plates to buy.  You went where you wanted and paid nothing, unless you wanted to pay someone to take you somewhere.  The only time you needed paperwork was in a foreign country, not in the United States.

The freedom to protect your own identity.  There weren't government-issued numbers or identity cards required for existence.  If you called someone by a number when my Grandfather was a kid, they'd have thought you were calling them a prison inmate or an ex-con.

There are many more examples of lost freedoms... all surrendered for some propagandized illusion.  Some purport safety or security; none actually provided more than a false-perception.  It can be argued we're less safe and secure than we were before those freedoms were abolished, anyway.  

These liberties are primarily given up to provide extra cash to line the pockets of politicians and their cronies.  People will tell your grandkids the freedoms you enjoyed, but allowed to go away for some nebulous reason, never existed.  That's a fact.