To a degree, yeah. That's what freedom is.

Freedom isn't, in fact, free. It's fucking stressful. Your right to choose who you get to marry means the stress of dating, loneliness, and rejection. Your right to choose your career means you may fail. Your right to worship or not worship as you please means your neighbor may believe in a god that says you're the spawn of Hell. Your right to a fair trial may mean you get stabbed to death in an alley by a psychopath who was freed due to a lack of evidence.

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Freedom isn't free, and the cost comes in the form of lethal risk. Freedom is dangerous. Freedom is work. Freedom is accepting that no one is going to come along and make the bad people and bad ideas disappear. This means, as I keep saying, that we have to do it the hard way. A world saturated with porn means we have to actually talk to our kids about objectification and consent. A world riddled with sickening ideologies means we have to talk to our kids about extremism, conspiracy theories, and the addictive nature of hate. It means learning how to counter bad expression with good expression.

This is what I fear we've failed to teach a generation -- that freedom is hard, that it's sometimes traumatizing, that it's the worst way to live, aside from all of the other ways. And as the world becomes more and more stressful, as we are exposed to more and more ugliness, we will hear more and more voices offering to take it all away. They won't tell you the truth, that right now your freedom is someone else's burden, that they see your choices and expression as a blight on their landscape, that they too have a soothing voice in their ear offering to protect them from you. The same voice that offers to save you from the Nazis promises to save them from Antifa. Or the immigrants, or the rapists, or the terrorists, or the pornographers, or the drug dealers, or the animal rights activists.* Whatever monster scares them into saying, "Yes, you can rule me. Just take my fear away."