It is human nature to take for granted ideas and values that seem permanently lodged in the background of our daily lives. We get used to enjoying certain freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution and can easily forget how rare it is for governments around the world to restrain their powers so that their citizens can enjoy rights that may be inconvenient or threatening to those in power.

This clash of ideas has been in the news lately in Hong Kong, where the citizens have come out in force to restrain the government’s threatened curtailment of their freedom. But for us, here in American, many of us are apathetic.

Take our Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to our Constitution. For those of our Founders who feared that, having overthrown our English king, we risked anointing a king-like president of our own, the Bill of Rights was their price for being willing to adopt our Constitution. The idea that “We the People” (even if back then it mostly meant “We White Men of Property”) were the ones who deserved the right to largely govern ourselves was a truly revolutionary concept in the 18th Century.

Sadly, it remains both “revolutionary” and all too rare in the world three centuries later. And many Americans feel that some of these rights are under threat here at home.

But to fully appreciate how special it is to be a citizen of a nation that celebrates the rights of individuals even, and especially, when those individuals do not conform to the beliefs and customs of the majority, try taking translated copies of our Bill of Rights to China. Hand them out in Tiananmen Square on the 30th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of young Chinese citizens who were demonstrating for a more democratic government and had erected their own “Statue of Liberty.”

If you don’t get a friendly reception there, try taking other copies out to the provinces where more than a million Chinese Muslims are being held in indoctrination camps to “re-educate” them to abandon their religious beliefs.

Or head to Shanghai and try to publish a newspaper that dares to challenge the leadership of President Ji and the dictatorship of the Communist Party. As you move about (closely followed by the police), tick off each of the 10 “Rights” that don’t apply to citizens of China. You won’t be left with any on your list, as you are hustled off to jail or booted out of the country.

I focus on China because it is emerging as perhaps the dominant power of the 21st Century, economically and politically. Chinese leaders believe that democracy is not (as we have long assumed it to be) necessary for the advancement of society. They are convinced that as long as Chinese feel their incomes are rising, they will agree to be ruled by a small group of (mostly) men who see our Bill of Rights as an unacceptable impediment to their power.

We are used to potentates and dictators ruling poor countries where few citizens are well-educated. What we are not used to is former democracies, like Hungary, Poland, Turkey – and perhaps even Italy, too – turning their backs on democratic values and undermining citizens’ rights while advancing nationalist bigotry. Yet we live in a world where authoritarian leaders are increasingly muscling their way into power by preying on the prejudices of their citizens against people who look different, sound different or pray to different gods.

In his insightful book The Road to Unfreedom, Yale professor Timothy Snyder points out the glaring mistake we make to assume that the world is moving inevitably to adopt Western ideas of democratic capitalism. He details how Russia’s Vladimir Putin is engineering the demise of democracy in Europe, with disturbing echoes here in America.

Less than 20 years after the end of World War I, the war that was supposed to “make the world safe for democracy” (in President Woodrow Wilson’s words), Germany and Italy adopted fascism and, along with the military rulers of Japan, led us into World War II.

There are serious consequences, for America and the world, when citizens take their citizenship, and its essential freedoms, for granted.

(Robert L. Fried, a retired professor of education at Northeastern University and former head of the Upper Valley Educators Institute in Lebanon, lives in Concord.)