Please read this article first which provides context for the book excerpt that follows.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/03/05/obama-admin-wants-to-deport-christian-homeschoolers/

By the way, it didn’t have to be that particular article. There are a thousand other links that could have been used for the same purpose spreading back over the last 60 months since Obama began actively campaigning for POTUS and saying what his intentions were.  That one just happened to be a current update regarding an ongoing situation.

They Thought They Were Free: the Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer

In Russian-Communized East Germany after the second World War, a worker in a State factory is compelled to attend one meeting a week, of two hours, for purposes of what we should call “indoctrination” or “brain-washing” and what the Communists call “education.”  Beyond that and paying his taxes, he is compelled to do nothing more, he takes military service, secret police, and rationing for granted (as who doesn’t?).  Of course, he is blared at, from posters, newspapers, radio, and public address systems (as who isn’t, for one purpose or another?), but he is let alone.

Most Germans–nearly all of them, after twelve years of Nazism–see nothing inordinate in this amount of compulsion.  Even under Nazism (before the way), Party members were required to give only Friday evenings and Sunday mornings to Party or public work.  

Beyond this point, service to the tyranny was, naturally, highly advisable for the ambitious and the politically suspect, but it was not required of the man who wanted to hold a job, a home, a family, and an honored place in the Singvereign or the Turnverein.  I encountered a few civil servants in Kronenberg who had never joined the Party and had not been bothered; they were the kind that never joined anything, and nobody expected them to–the kind, too, that is never promoted; and I met a pastor who had not been persecuted although he had refused to let his children join the Hitler Youth and the German Maidens until membership became automatic.

It is local conditions, even under totalitarianism, which govern the application of public authority to the individual.  These conditions, which vary so much elsewhere, varied much more than I had supposed possible under National Socialism and tended almost always to relax the central controls (just as local courts everywhere tend to relax legal principles), ….

Pastor Wilhelm Mensching, in the village of Petzen, in Lower Saxony, preached anti-Naxism to his little flock during the whole twelve year that the Nazis were in power in Germany….Mensching was never touched; when the Gestapo came…to arrest him, the Burgermeister went to the Gauleiter to oppose them, and the arrest wasn’t made…to disturb him would have been an intolerable disturbance to the configuration of the village.  And both he and the Burgermeister knew it.

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So.

What  intolerable disturbance on a personal level would be the point at which you say,  “When they do THIS, I will actively resist.” “HERE I will take action.”  “HERE I will say, ‘No’.”

For millions of Americans that point was reached when the gun controls started being discussed a couple of months ago.  I’ve got a question for you:

Why were many of those same people silent about obamacare and the death panels? I’m not trying to pick on them, but I am asking why they were silent earlier. And I am suggesting that some were silent simply because taking their guns is where their personal line was drawn.  The attacks on freedom hadn’t gotten to their line yet.  Then it did.

Why are some Americans still silent about the attacks against freedom of religion?  (and it’s not “freedom of worship”–it’s freedom of religion–big distinction).  It’s because of where their lines are drawn.

Should we not lay aside our personal line-drawings, which will inherently reflect individual variables, individual fright-points and look at the Constitutional lines? When we use the Constitution instead of our personal priorities as the measurement, we will have a more accurate report regarding the freedoms that have already been dissolved.

I want to consider the big picture like at least six German Generals did, fairly early on; like Deitrich Bonhoeffer did; like Martin Neimollar did and respond  to the facts about the big picture, whether or not my personal lines of tolerance have been offended and startled yet.

What level of generic loss of freedom are we willing to absorb before facing the reality that we have already lost some specific freedom?  We’re deceiving ourselves if we think that generic loss of freedom is somehow less threatening than specific loss of freedom.

Do we adjust how freedom is defined in order to avoid dealing with the loss of it? Why does the prospect of acknowledging freedoms already lost scare us more than the loss itself?

Real grief over real losses will not weaken us and  it will not supplant resistance.

Checking my lines.  Checking my tolerances.  Checking my definitions.  Checking my fears.