{"id":45202,"date":"2021-10-26T06:35:31","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T11:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/?p=45202"},"modified":"2021-10-26T06:35:31","modified_gmt":"2021-10-26T11:35:31","slug":"spine-tingling-similarities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/blog\/spine-tingling-similarities\/","title":{"rendered":"Spine-Tingling Similarities"},"content":{"rendered":"
Lost jobs. Government deciding everything for you. Travel allowed to approved areas only. Free thinking is not valued or rewarded. Families separated.<\/span><\/p>\n Sound familiar?<\/span><\/p>\n It should. But I am not talking about life in Canada or the United States as it is today. It is a chilling description of living in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall when Communist Russia was in charge. Winston Churchill used the term \u201cIron Curtain\u201d for a reason.<\/span><\/p>\n We Should all Learn from what Happened<\/b><\/p>\n The more freedoms we give up, the harder they are to get back.<\/span><\/p>\n I listened to a podcast with a Dresden resident about her experience growing up in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She was a teenager at the time. Like all of us, her experiences shaped her outlook on the rest of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n Travel within Eastern Europe was allowed. Travel west, however, was forbidden. She could go to the Soviet Union, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. After the border opened, she embraced her newfound freedom and would go with her friends to a different capital in Europe every weekend. Eastern Europeans had an excellent education but there were no opportunities. The people from the East were treated as second-class citizens.<\/span><\/p>\n