“Freedom is risky. Nature makes no promises.”

Proof of this was when the Soviet Union crumbled , many older Soviet Citizens longed even for the Stalin era because they knew what they had, horrible though it was. They had lived under the iron boot of Communism for most of their lives and were scared as to what to do next.

I like it - a lot

Freedom must be regarded as the highest aspiration of man.
Look what can happen when you "don't love freedom" enough...“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.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thank you, said well. Amerika has become such a place. The once land of the free and home of the brave now revel in their religious subservience to the police state's compelled compliance, license, victimless crimes, larceny with impunity, no personal rights and all else as tyrants have to inflict. It has been my personal experience that the socialists have come after the natural law living free men / women (veterans, Christians, etc.), the guns and more. A question for the readers of this blog. Concerning the phrase serve and protect (at nature, law enforcement being an oxymoron). When a standing army's agent (any employed of a policing agency) is following directly behind you in a black and white (figurative - may be any color), do you feel served and protected ? The nature of freedom is "When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny" (Jefferson)

"Liberty is the hardest test one can inflect on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations." 
Paul Valery, 

Such is life!!  You get out of it what you put into it.  Risk is inherent.  Death is guaranteed.  So what are you going to do?  That is the nobility of the common man.  Have some courage!