You look back at the time you picketed in front of the White house to protest the government's nuclear arms race with the former Soviet Union.  You then think about how the nuclear arms race was way of demonstrating power between two different, yet, powerful  ideas about government; those two ideas being Democracy and Communism.  From your perspective,  you think about how the citizens under a communist government could not express themselves freely if their individual ideas opposed the government.  It made you cringe to think about how citizens were forced, sometimes through violence, to uphold the practices of the government because it was for the good of the country as a whole and in that process the right of the individual were lost.
 All of the sudden, you hear a telephone ring in the office down the hall.  You then start thinking of the European Union once again.  You start to wonder if the European Union could lead the the same type of loss of individual rights for the purpose of the common good. You do not want the loss of human rights to rear its ugly head once more when you can do something about it.  You decide that you  have to find out...