It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Originally posted by Krazysh0t
This is no problem for me. I'm already barely hanging on with the essentials, let alone the luxury items. I can barely afford to buy groceries each month and pay my bills. I don't have cable tv or the internet at my house. I have to go to the library, school, or use my cell phone. Speaking of cell phones, I took years to get a smart phone and just got buy with a non smartphone for a few years after my plan ended. I only recently upgraded because I found out that I can pay the same amount I was paying for my old pay as you go plan as I would with a smart phone.
However as a veteran and someone who is used to going with minimal stuff for long periods of time I've always been able to recognize the useless things in society and not become dependent on them. Its really not that hard once you get used to it. Heck my mom used to be completely dependent on cable tv and now doesn't need it to watch nearly as much television as she used to (she still watches some with an antenna but your options are very limited with that).
My normal method of creating threads ( other than BTS chit chat and rant threads ) is customarily to do a lot of research, seek out a number of seemingly legitimate sources ( the best available on any given subject ), use those sources to provide what I feel to be enough supporting external content to offer proof to my assertions, and then to find a number of pictures and create a banner - because, honestly, threads with pictures, banners, and a few Youtube vids really do seem to get more traffic. Today I am neglecting all of those steps and am going to approach things differently. Today I am simply going to consolidate a few thoughts I've posted elsewhere, in various threads, into one cohesive idea. It will be short, concise, and about as plain as it can be. So please forgive me if you're a fan of the shiny things. Today I want the idea to matter - not the wrapping.