When I was a kid, it was not uncommon to hear someone say, “Hey, it’s a free country,” in response to someone else’s opinion or decision. Normally, if you said this, it meant that you disagreed with the opinion or decision, or even felt that their statement was wrong or stupid, but you recognized their right as a free person in a free country to make that call for themselves.
Today, this phrase is rarely heard. At least, I can’t recall the last time I heard it. The more contemporary correlate to this phrase, at least on social media, seems to be: “Your opinion is offensive. If you do not change it, I will report you to the authorities.”
America was a better place when people used to just shrug and say: “It’s a free country.” The truly sad thing is that the younger generations (those born in the 1990s and later) never really knew that America. They only know the grotesque parody of that America as seen through the history-distorting prism of propagandist textbook authors like Howard Zinn. They have been inculcated into a warped society that feels that the best way to fight what you perceive to be fascism is to act like a fascist.
How few of them realize that they have become what they purport to despise.
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