This is a hell of a paragraph

[Johnny2X2X]

26. Americans don't even know what freedom is anymore

And I'll generalize like the author too, but the vast majority of the people in this country have no idea what freedom really means. They think freedom is guns, they think freedom from being shot is tyranny. They think freedom is an incredibly powerful and overbearing law enforcement and criminal justice system that tramples on the rights of citizens with impunity.

I tell the story often of being at college in the 1990s and making friends with several German foreign exchange students. They were absolutely stunned at how much power we gave to law enforcement in the US. They couldn't fathom that the police would knock on your door and then enter your home when you opened it, or could demand you answer their questions. They couldn't believe they were allowed to ask for your identification without any reason. They were shocked that people could get their person or cars searched without a court order. And at the time they were shocked at how severe the US looked at weed crimes. In lengthy discussions about this, I decided that Germans were much more free than Americans, in almost every way that really matters.

In Germany, not exactly a country people associate with freedom, you have more rights. And the laws are stronger to protect those rights. And they look at freedom a little differently in some cases. There, drunk driving is looked at much more harshly than it is in the US, so very few people drive drunk, and this in their eyes expands the freedom of the many to be safe from drunk drivers.

In the US, when people talk about freedom, they usually are talking about corporate freedom, or the freedom to put others in danger. We've lost touch with the meaning of the word.