Let me tell you a little fable…or is it a parable…I’m not sure.
Imagine you’re an average Joe in 1967 Communist Czechoslovakia. You’ve been saving to buy a car - a Skoda MB 1000, no other choice is feasible - but you’re still not there. No matter. Streetcars and buses get you everywhere you need to go in Prague. For travel outside the city, rail connections are plentiful and cheap - though severely lacking in the hygiene department. If you want to visit your brother in Brno, some 250 miles away, you hop on a fast(ish) train and pay the equivalent of about 3 dollars. Food is plentiful and inexpensive, though the selection is somewhat limited.
Now let’s have a look at your personal freedoms. There is basically one rule: you can’t badmouth the government in public. In private, or over beers with friends you can say whatever you want after ensuring no secret agents are present. On the weekends, you take a bus to your little cottage. Beer flows feely, as does the supply of bratwursts and rye bread. Life overall is slow and somewhat tedious, but no longer dangerous the way it had been in the 1950’s.
How about travel abroad? A journey to one of the “fraternal countries” such as East Germany (better consumer electronics) or Hungary (better wine and sausage) are hassle-free. Visas are no longer needed. Just exchange your worthless Czech crowns into worthless Hungarian forints are you’re free to vacation on Lake Balaton or stroll on the boulevards of Budapest. Even with no automobile, such short trips are easy: train, plus public transit where you’re going. Once ensconced in your hotel just check the picture frames and the chandelier for bugs and you’re golden. And by bugs I don’t mean roaches or spiders.
Traveling to the West involved more bureaucratic complexity but was not impossible. You needed letters of invitation, access to hard currency and to grease a few palms. But by the late 1960’s, many people did manage a short trip to the “forbidden fruit” countries such as Austria or West Germany.
Now, dear reader, transport yourself to the city of Toronto, Canada in 2022. Unlike the 1960’s Czech citizen, you most likely own a personal vehicle - if you don’t, your life would be unmitigated misery.
Supermarket shelves are not completely empty, but they display ominous gaps where certain staples used to be. If you enter without a face covering, you’ll be stared at - though I hear things are improving in that regard.
The average single family dwelling costs on average $1,000.000 (yes, it’s a million Canadian dollars, so really “only” $850,000) Gasoline for your automobile is around $6 a gallon. If you bought a country cottage on a lake in the 1970’s, you can be like your Czech counterpart from the 20th century. But if you did not buy one back then and do not have a relative who’s willing to host you…the average cottage within 200 miles of the city costs about the same as a house IN the city. You’ve struck out.
As for personal freedoms: you can say anything you want as long as it’s in line with the government “narrative”. You won’t go to jail if you deviate from the official line, but expect to be shunned by former friends and called in for a chat by your HR department. You are freer than a 1967 Czechoslovak citizen de jure. But de facto - you have about the same level of freedom.
Travel is where you’re screwed. There are no cheap trains and no cheap flights. Not only that: unless you belong to the approved (read: jabbed) majority - you can’t travel by train, or bus or plane anyway. (Again: I hear things are getting better - but for the sake of argument stay with me) You can drive to visit your brother in Winnipeg - but Canada is 20 times larger than Czechoslovakia and driving to see your brother in Winnipeg 1200 miles away at 6 bucks a gallon, with a total of 3 weeks of vacation time at your $18 an hour job is not realistic.
Let me sum up all this misery up in one sentence: what is happening in Canada, and to a lesser degree in the USA and the EU is NOT why my parents risked it all and left Communism behind. We left it behind to live in a world that looked more like New York before September 11, 2001, when the US reacted to a barbaric act of terrorism by crapping its pants, establishing the DHS, immersing itself in a 20-year war and curtailing the freedoms of citizens to an unprecedented degree. And if we can’t have September 10, 2001, we would settle for January 2020. What Canadian, Australian and other citizens have now is, in my experience, a degree or two worse than Eastern Europe in the late 1960 and again the late 1980’s. The coercive measures our western governments have become so enamored of lead to only one outcome. Always, without exception. We continue on this road until we are Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea. If we abandon free market capitalism, constitutional order and the sanctity of private property and of God given rights, we will hurtle down into the same dark abyss. Without exception and without exemption.
Always inspiration and the storyteller is captivating
WTC 7 did not collapse itself:
https://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7
https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016474p21.pdf
The US did not "react to a barbaric act of terrorism by crapping its pants."
The US created an act of terrorism to set in motion the eventual self-destruction of the United States.
All of this has been planned since around the year 1967 - the year you describe in the post.