It was as much, if not more, a frame of mind, as it was a way of acting. The mind had to be kept free, and the dissident had to live to fight another day.

He would also, likely, live a less-than-affluent, possibly even impoverished, existence as he sought to speak truth as much as he could get away with, as he sought to disobey as often as he could.

While it may have come with consequences, that disobedience offered its own reward. Henry David Thoreau writes "Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."

Barely any framework for disciplining the dissident exists in America today the way it did in communist Czechoslovakia. At least not yet. A dissident might have been assigned a handler to check in with him. A dissident might have been prevented from travel. The children of dissidents might have been prevented from pursuing higher education. The extended family of a dissident might have been denied economic opportunity. The punishment of loved ones was perhaps the worst part. Self-deportation may have been strongly encouraged in some cases where a person was committed to domestic political change. Prison time and hard labor were both possibilities. In a totalitarian regime, the cruelty that can be visited upon a dissident has little limit, other than the imagination and enthusiasm of the homeland security officer assigned to the dissident.