It's not as if the average individual government employee has the ability to spawn black helicopters or deploy police assets just to settle a neighborhood rivalry. If anything they have less actual power than a corporate drone nowadays (just ask the bankers).

Teenagers have killed themselves over stuff posted to Facebook so I wish people would quit acting like the government is really that much more directly important to the day-to-day lives of people. If you're going to be worried then be worried, but at least be consistently worried.

http://xkcd.com/1200/ is also close to relevant.