Roads to Unfreedom

When I thought of all the ways I might spend my Memorial Day week-end, crawling in and out of bed was not one of them.  I had plans; I had projects.  But I caught a cold from somewhere, and so I took it easy.

I was able to get the grading for my online classes done.  We were able to go to church and get together with friends afterwards.  But for the most part, I just hunkered down and tried not to cough.

Now my body hurts with all the effort:  the coughing and the trying not to cough.  Ugh.

I was also able to get some reading done.  Timothy Snyder's new book, The Road to Unfreedom, is the type of book I renewed the maximum amount of time, and then had to turn it in, check it back out, and start over again.

Here's the take away from the book:  everything you've heard about Russia is true and then some.  It was both fascinating and terrifying to read about how Russia has tried, and for the most part succeeded, to make the world less stable and less democratic.  All the stories you've heard on the major news outlets about how Russia tried to influence the 2016 election?  It was actually much worse and much more widespread.

You may be one of the people who scoffed.  Like me, you may have said, "Surely most folks don't fall for these types of hijinks?!!"

Sadly, they do and they did and they likely will again.  My spouse who has advanced degrees in Philosophy can tell you all the ways his students are no longer schooled in critical thinking, the ways his students have changed since he first started teaching in 1992.  He's not wrong in that.

The book documents the ways that our U.S. president is in deep debt, all sorts of debt, to the country of Russia.  It's terrifying.  I may have disagreed deeply with some of the policies of past administrations, but I never worried that those leaders would sell the U.S. to another country or subvert the best interests of the U.S. to the interests of a different country who does not hold similar values.

I think of my younger years, when we were taught to fear Communists.  Once, those fears seemed baseless, the last bastion of the Cold War.  Now, it seems, we need to go to school again.  Once, many of us might have thought that our own government might work against us, but that we didn't need to fear outside countries.  Now it's clear that we need to defend our freedoms on multiple fronts.

Perhaps I should be grateful that I have a cold.  Otherwise, I might not have been able to sleep at all while reading this book.