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Heads up to anyone railfanning the CN...

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[quote user="Phoebe Vet"] Selector:I don't know about the others, but I, for one, do NOT think the old days were more innocent or more friendly. In fact, I think just the opposite. I believe that we are in no greater danger now than we have ever been, and that the climate of fear that currently permeates our society is completely groundless.Does any rational human actually think that a loosely organized band of primitive religious zealots is a greater threat than the "cold war"? Is the thought of Iran having a couple of Nukes even remotely in the same class as when the USSR had THOUSANDS of nuclear intercontinental Ballistic missiles, and hundreds of submarine based nuclear missiles all carefully aimed our way?If you think crazy people with guns are something new, then you weren't black in the south in the '50s.As far as your prediction that future generations will not understand my generation's concerns about loss of freedom, you are probably correct. You tend to not miss what you never had. The current crop of young people (under 40) have been having their lockers, book bags, backpacks, and pockets randomly searched since the third grade. They tend to be less disturbed when the government wants to do it to them as adults.What is really different today is that we have competing 24 hour a day news media, who overly dramatize everything in the never ending quest for ratings. Burglaries have become "home invasions", cars no longer have accident's, they "slam into each other", and crimes are generalized to make the danger seem much worse than it is. If an illegal immigrant drives drunk and is involved in a fatal auto accident, the news will point out how many thousands of aliens are illegally here and lead the citizens who tend to not actually think things through to believe that the roads are therefore overrun with drunken aliens. Child predators are lumped in with tens of thousands of people who have been convicted of some kind of crime that involves sex, so that people think that there are thousands of evil sex offenders prowling the streets hunting our children.The fear is paralyzing our society, and causing us to give up everything that made America unique.Now, since this has really strayed from the trains subject, I will not post anything else on this subject.[/quote]The one problem I see with this line of thinking is that the leaders of the USSR, up until Gorby, lived through the horrors of World War II, and they saw the unbelievable devastation that was delivered onto their homeland.  The Soviets lost somewhere near 30 million people, and their leadership had those very real visions of the effect of "total war" ever-present in their minds as a very sobering factor.  The Islamic militants of today have no such experiences - not even close, and they have little interest in understanding such realities.  That's all I have to say on this subject, since it's off th topic of railroading.
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