Many people long for and fight for one form or another of freedom.   Many others have it and take it for granted.  In this account, people long denied freedom of information are annoyed when it finally arrives – all that bother having to sift through divergent views and perspectives, weigh up complexities and form conclusions as best they can.  

More often, people were irritated with freedom. “I buy three newspapers and each one has its own version of the truth.  Where’s the real truth?  You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know all you needed to know, understand everything you needed to understand.” 

This is from the preface to Alexievich’s interviews with post-Soviet Russians.  

Let us guard against freedom fatigue.   

Source: Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The last of the Soviets, trans. by Bela Shayevich (New York: Random House, 2017), p. 6

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