I recall a blog posting a while back from a guy in Portland. He went into a coffee shop and while there listened to several different conversations going on around him, primarily concerned with how terrible a “police state” the US of A is becoming.
Since this blogger’d just recently returned from Libya where and estimated 16% of the country is paid informants for the government and secret police, this struck him as absurd, and he blogged about how he had to resist the temptation to go over to the largest group and say “Secret Police! You’re all under arrest!”
Frankly, I wish he had. Perhaps they would have realized then that open public conversations in gathering places with no fear of any kind of reprisal can hardly happen in a true police state.
As so many have already noted — speaking without fear of consequences hardly denotes courage.
