Featured image by Michelle Grewe. Follow the link for more of this artist’s work.
I have said before that we must be responsible with our rights. We have the freedoms to speech, assembly, the press, petition, and religion. These freedoms, enshrined in our Constitution, are… or were… meant to be absolute. Congress could not abridge them. Over the next four years of the Biden administration, these liberties will be chipped away in pieces, and eroded by the cultural institutions that have been captured by collectivist thinking (Hollywood, corporate America, education, and now the government itself). These liberties were intended for individuals, that no one person may have those rights infringed upon.
The most vocal opinion, not to conflate it with popular opinion, is that those who stormed the capitol represent the entirety of the previous president’s supporters, and that they are equally as guilty as the small group who committed crimes, along with former president Trump. The calls by this group are for social exile, de-platforming, and removal from “polite society,” creating two separate political Americas. Over the next four years, we’ll have to wait and see whether the Supreme Court is packed, the filibuster is nixed, states are added, and the federal system manipulated to give the Democrats an inherent advantage going into future federal elections. We’ll have to wait to see if the Republican party coalesces around one of the two competing ideologies that have split the party, or if they fracture under the stress. We’ll have to wait and see what sort of waves result now that the cancel-culture warriors have scored a political victory.
This, in my opinion, is the result of our irresponsibility. We, to riff on what Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, “were so preoccupied with whether or not we could,” push the boundaries of our free speech and expression, that we “didn’t stop to think if [we] should.” We have reverted to an infantile understanding of those freedoms, screeching about our “freedoms,” and our “rights,” that it became commonplace for what we perceived to be our freedoms to trample all over another person. We became hyper-individualistic, believing that our individual freedoms were so important that they superseded everyone else’s rights. This works both ways, and the erosion of mutual respect, ethics results in people believing that individuals are incapable of caring for those rights, and that, in order to protect the larger collective, those individual liberties must be curtailed.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, nor are the calls for curtailing of free speech new. Going back to World War I and the introduction of the Espionage Act of 1917 (link to History.com for more info). The fervor over the use of language and the effect it may have on someone becomes the grounds by which people are no longer permitted to speak freely, as slippery of a slope as it could be. Following the capitol riot, the words treason and sedition have been thrown around quite a lot. A quick search on social media reveals numerous uses and hashtags, elevating both the temperature of the argument and the blood pressure of anyone reading it.
Free speech is more important than ever. The efforts to curtail free speech are sobering and cause for great pause. Responsibility must begin with the individual if we have any hope of calming things down. I fear that this isn’t going to be the case, but I pray that I am wrong.
A Place 4Politics 