I understand. You have so much to lose if you do something. But here is what you can lose if you do nothing.

I was born and grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. We lived close to Austria but obviously we could not go there until after the revolution. But after the Iron Curtain fell I went to Vienna with one of my brothers and my parents. To this day I remember the shock after we returned back from that short visit - everything just looked grey... grey buildings, grey people, everything looked dead and falling apart... one of the most depressing moments of my life.

The problem with authoritarian state is not that it is easy to personally get into trouble. The real problem is that the fear spreads and kills those fragile things needed to move the society forward - communication, cooperation, creativity. Incentives that drive people are perverted. In every society there are people who are pathological, cold, selfish, hypocritical, cowardly. Authoritarian states are wired in such way that it's favourable to those people - they get to the top and gain control over the society. Yes, it takes years, even decades. But so many lives are ruined in the process... and at the end the society is just broken beyond repair, you cannot trust even your closest relatives and everything starts to fall apart (and I mean that - at the end of the regime many buildings were not repaired for decades and they literally started to fall apart and sometimes you could not get hands on even the most basic stuff like toilet paper).

And don't forget... living in fear is going to cost you. Even when you are careful and you never do anything that would put you on their radar it still affects your life deeply... somehow it kills human spirit. You step back a little, start thinking about what you can or cannot say, you rationalize it... and pretty soon you don't even know who you really are any more. I remember Pavel Kohout (Czech writer and disident) talking about some of his colleagues, other writers, talented and promising... who compromised, changed their books out of fear... and never wrote anything decent again. Creativity needs freedom.

I also remember that after the revolution I went to some movie festival and there were some women - political prisoners talking about their experiences. Most of them were really old ladies and some of them spent more than twenty years in prison just for saying what they wanted to say. Some of them were tortured. But they were incredible, not bitter at all, without hate or vindictiveness, so strong, vital, they were even joking about it (really black humour) with charisma just squirting out of them. They decided to live their lives on their terms, not defeated by fear. They paid horrible price for that... and each of them said they feel it was worth it, they do not regret anything and that they are happy in life.

To be really happy, you need to be happy with yourself. And when you live in fear you kill that... each time you do something that's not really yours and is motivated by fear you kill little part or yourself. I am not judging. I totally understand that many people rather give up their freedom of expression or even collaborate with the regime so the regime would not ruin their or their children's future. I would probably give up under pressure. I am just talking about stuff that people from countries which have not experienced authoritarian regime yet might not realize.