We are, after all, slowly heading in the same direction.
“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
We do, however, have the second amendment. If we choose the time and place to use it, should that time come, that line be crossed.
But I ask you, where is the line? Is it distinct enough to see?
Or will we allow ourselves, like the frog, to be boiled slowly? Will we even notice the increasing temperature?
Will we one day wake up and see the line, sharply focused, behind us?
Will we lament as he did, too late?