It is very hard for Americans to comprehend the idea of blatant oppression by the government as Americas always had a gentler approach to oppressing it's citizenry. I have quite a few friends from eastern European origin and it is always peculiar when you get into a discussion about the government with them and their voice immediately drops into whisper. After all of these years thy still have it in the back of their mind that someone from the party could be listening. Pretty creepy stuff if you stop to think about it.
Well, I have a story about that, from 2005. We were in Hungary (oddly enough) and were watching a show in which you could SMS in stuff from your phone and it would scroll across the screen, and some of it was political in nature.
My then-12-year-old daughter said, "So I could say, 'Bush is an idiot' and it would show up on the screen?" (Yeah, my politics is always pretty obvious.)
I laughed and said, "Sure could!"
She thought it over and said, "But would my name be on it? Maybe that wouldn't be a good idea."
I realized at that point that it was safer to express political dissent at that time in freaking Hungary than in the United States of America, and that my daughter knew that. Talk about a blow-your-mind situation.
My wife will talk anybody's ear off about politics face-to-face, and she has entirely radical opinions for our venue of Indiana. But if it's on the record? No way. She says we just don't need that kind of trouble.
