The America that Used to Be

SEE HERE A friend sent me this link and it got me to thinking about my own story in the America that used to be.  We've lost it and if we don't do something soon we'll have lost it forever.  What have we lost?  We've lost freedom.  We lost what it means to be an American and in its place we are rapidly putting a sense of entitlement without earning or responsibility, a sense that the world somehow owes us a living.  That sense is so far from reality that it can only end up with a disastrously disappointing collapse which seems already to be underway.
It's a new reality which has come on in my own lifetime.  I've watched it as more and more freedoms have been taken away, always with some nice sounding reason, safety or health or security or comfort or a million other nice sounding things that cumulatively become a straitjacket of regulations and controls.
The big problem is that most people don't remember and have no idea about how things used to be.  What they experience today is the new normal and they think that is freedom.  Then it continues downhill from there.  One simple step down at a time, all in the name of some good sounding thing.  The problem is that freedom entails risks.  If you're unable to take risks then you can't be free.  They will wrap you up in a cocoon of soft rubber and feed you through a tube and maybe they'll plug you into the Matrix and you'll never know that you were never free.