© Off-Guardian
Can I be so bold as to say I may have figured something out? It is probably something all of you already know, as I can be a bit slow on the uptake.
I keep hearing from the sheep-types that they really don't care if we lose all of our freedoms. They don't care about losing privacy because they don't have anything to hide, they don't care about losing free speech because people should be punished for saying bad and/or dangerous things (and they have nothing to say that would be considered bad and/or dangerous).They have no fear of the government getting too much control because there will never be a reason the government would want or need to control them. They don't fear communism or fascism primarily because they don't know what those two ideologies clearly mean, and besides, that would never happen in a free society — which they are ready to give up anyway.
Of course, to all of us shrew-types, we practically lose our cookies thinking about living in a society where basic freedoms have been stripped away, or where the government, or any other authority, has power over our movements, our money, and our fundamental existence. When we hear someone say,
"I don't care how much control the authorities have, I have nothing to hide, and I do nothing wrong, therefore it is not something to worry about for me," we blow a gasket.
Don't they know?
Don't they know that when the control over the masses surely does take effect it won't matter a tinker's damn if they "have nothing to hide" or "don't do anything bad." Oppression comes in many flavours, and its primary purpose is not to punish wrongdoing, but rather to keep people, in a very general way, compliant and under control.Control sets the tone of the behaviour of a society. A good example of this came about during the Canadian Trucker's Convoy. People who donated to that cause ran the risk of having their bank accounts frozen. (I was one that this happened to.) Was donating to a "cause" such as the Trucker's Convoy a "bad thing" — was it against the law, was it criminal? In a free society, protesting (peacefully) and standing up against any sort of injustice an individual finds abhorrent is one of our fundamental rights as citizens of a free country.
Comment: This case, likely one of many, reveals how loosely USAID was managed and how easy it was to manipulate contracts for personal gain via bribery and fraud.