Smoking In The Park Banned, Ticketed For Cussing In Class And 14 Other Examples Of How Big Brother Is Systematically Ripping Our Liberties And Freedoms Away

by Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream
Feb. 04, 2011

When our founding fathers established this nation, they did so with the intention that government would be very limited and that there would be a tremendous amount of liberty and freedom. But today that is such a distant memory that we don't even remember what "the land of the free and the home of the brave" actually means anymore. Our lives are constrained by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations and it gets worse every single day. The federal government, state governments, local governments and even homeowners associations have become absolutely tyrannical. There is a "law" or a "rule" for almost everything now, and many of them are absolutely ridiculous. Big Brother is ripping our liberties and freedoms away from us at a blistering pace. Just about any activity that you can think of other than sitting completely still in utter silence in your own home is tightly regulated by government. This is not what our founding fathers intended.

There are so many laws, rules and regulations out there today that nobody can possibly know them all, much less keep them all. Unfortunately, politics tends to keep attracting new crops of control freaks that are eager to impose even more ridiculous laws on all of us.

We have become so tightly controlled and so tightly restrained that there is very little room for any real freedom in America today. Do our politicians even know what they mean when they give speeches about "liberty" and "freedom" anymore? It is almost as if those two words have completely lost their meaning.

All around us a control grid is being constructed. It was very subtle at first, but now it has become very much "in our faces". The TSA abuse that is going on at airports across the United States is perhaps the most obvious example, but the truth is that we are constantly seeing new examples of the encroachment of Big Brother in our lives. These days there seems to be a never ending parade of new laws, new security measures, new taxes, new "requirements", new paperwork and new ways that the government is trying to control our behavior. It just seems as though there is an endless hunger for more cameras, more bureaucrats, more police brutality, more government snooping, more security and more control.

We can't claim to be a "free country" while we are living like this. But very, very few of our politicians are even talking about the need to get the government off of our backs.

The United States is supposed to be free, but instead we are being transformed into just another control freak society. Well, the truth is that the American people don't want to go down the path that the Europeans and the Chinese have gone.

We want our liberties and our freedoms back.

The following are 16 examples of how Big Brother is systematically ripping our liberties and freedoms away from us....

#1 The New York City Council has voted to ban smoking in all public parks and on all public beaches. Of course smoking is very bad for the health and most of us wouldn't dream of smoking, but once upon a time Americans had the freedom to decide whether they wanted to smoke or not. Now that freedom is rapidly being lost.

#2 Did the police issue tickets for cussing in class when you were in high school? Well, it is happening today. A teenager in suburban Dallas was recently forced to take on a part-time job after being ticketed for using bad language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.

#3 It is not just high school kids that are being ticketed by police. In Texas the crackdown extends all the way down to elementary school students. In fact, it has been reported that Texas police gave "1,000 tickets" to elementary school kids over a recent six year period.

#4 The level of paranoia in our society has reached staggering heights. Recently, a 17 year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father's lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.

#5 Someday historians will look back and will be amazed at how much time, money and energy we spent coming up with ridiculous regulations. A new law requires a carbon monoxide detector to be installed on each floor of all single-family homes in the state of Colorado. While this may be a "good idea", the fact that the government is now forcing us to do these things under penalty of law just shows how much control they now have over the smallest details of our lives.

#6 Even the smallest offenses can result in brutal police violence these days. In Fairfax County, Virginia one man was shot and killed by police when they came to arrest him for betting on college football games.

#7 Want to record your interactions with police in order to protect yourself in court? Be careful. In some states it is actually illegal to film the cops arresting you. For example, in the city of Chicago, one artist now faces up to 15 years in prison for recording his own arrest by police.

#8 In some areas of the country, it is now actually a crime to not recycle properly. For example, the city of Cleveland has announced plans to sort through trash cans to ensure that people are actually recycling according to city guidelines. That is how extreme our control freak society has become.

#9 Not cooperating with the "authorities" can get you into a lot of trouble these days. In Washington D.C., if you do not submit to "random bag checks" while riding the Metro, there is a good chance that you could receive a follow-up visit by the FBI or by the Department of Homeland Security.

#10 If you make too much noise in your backyard in America today you may get tasered. For example, some time ago cops brutally tasered two adults, including a pregnant woman, in front of a yard packed with young children because the police felt that their Baptism party was making too much noise and they weren't being cooperative enough with police.

#11 If you make food "incorrectly" there is a good chance that you will get raided by the federal government. In fact, the feds recently raided an Amish farmer at 5 AM in the morning because they claimed that he was was engaged in the interstate sale of raw milk in violation of federal law.

#12 Oh, and you had better watch your lawn very, very carefully. A few years ago a 70 year old grandmother was actually put in handcuffs and hauled off to jail for having a brown lawn.

#13 Freedom of speech is just a memory in many areas of the United States today. In fact, police in many areas of the country seem to have absolutely no idea what the U.S. Constitution requires when it comes to free speech. On June 18th of last year, two Christians decided that they would peacefully pass out copies of the gospel of John on a public sidewalk outside a public Islamic festival in Dearborn, Michigan and within three minutes 8 policemen surrounded them and placed them under arrest.

#14 Today you can even be locked away for reading your spouse's email. A Michigan man has been charged with a felony and could face up to 5 years in prison for reading his wife's email.

#15 If you take too long to pull over for police in some areas of the United States, you could end up bloody and tasered. One 58 year-old woman in Utah learned this lesson very clearly after a cop punched her repeatedly in the face.

#16 In the United States today, you can't even feed the homeless without a permit. In Houston, Texas a couple named Bobby and Amanda Herring that had been feeding homeless people for over a year has been banned by the city from doing so. They were told that they needed a permit to feed the homeless and city officials say that they are not going to get one.

This is what America has turned into. Even something as basic as feeding your fellow man has become all about "regulations" and "permits".

We seem to have lost all of our common sense. We have allowed hordes of "control freak" bureaucrats to reign over us.

We have become a society that is so paralyzed by our own rules that we can barely even function anymore.

John Adams, the second president of the United States, once said the following....

"Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom."

But instead of instructing them about liberty and freedom we teach them how to be good servants of the system.

Somewhere along the line we have lost what it truly means to be Americans.

Hopefully the American people can recapture those principles before it is too late.
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Michael Snyder runs The End of the American Dream.