Recently, thanks to the micro social networking site, twitter - a journalist freed himself from an Egyptian prison. Unfortunately, his translator who was also arrested, has since disappeared in the Egyptian prison system. Americans, I think - would find this pretty common. Often when we think of places like Egypt or China or anywhere in Latin America, not to mention the Middle East - we think of people unjustly imprisoned or disappearing for their political beliefs. We think of dictatorships and lost liberties. We like to believe that we're the shining beacon of freedom in an otherwise harsh undemocratic world.

That's a funny notion, considering we have a quarter of the worlds prisoners. At one time, we might have been a good model for our "mildness" in treating prisoners, but that was over a century and a half ago. While in the past 177 years we've made great strides in "freedom," we've also done a fantastic job in finding quick and easy ways to curb it. Unless of course, the idea of a "torch team" makes you feel like you're free to be who you want to be.

Criminals and terrorists are to blame, of course - they want your freedom. Well, they don't want it persay, they want to steal it away from you and then burn it in effigy, because the majority of people in this world are nasty and brutish - and want to make life short. There's no way that crime and terrorism can be linked to anything else - other than that people in the world are either "good" or "evil" - and there are more "evil" people than anything else.

The best way to fight this of course is "if you see something, say something."

Seriously though, it creeps into your head - no matter how much you don't want to end up a paranoid neoconservative (some of us prefer being paranoid, but not conservative). We've been hearing that crime is on the rise for years and now there are thousands of surveilance cameras watching our every move. We don't object, because we feel safer because *we're* not the ones doing anything wrong. We don't object to wiretapping because, of course, *we're* not terrorists. It's always those other guys, the ones whispering in dark corners or meeting in secret in basements.

It's always the other guys, until we're the only guys left, whispering in dark corners