A few months ago I was riding the New York City Subway. I saw a man with a hat with a saying on the hat. The saying read “The Second Amendment, the original homeland security.” My guess, from the NRA logo on the hat, was that he was not referring to the National Guard (the first part of the Second Amendment, remember) and its valuable role as part of the American military establishment. What he was doing was expressing his views, a basic part of the American culture, in a place which might not be sympathetic to them. Criticize his views if you want, but don’t mock his right to express his views. Of course, in the proverbial New York City, no one else might have noticed.
Too many cases, unfortunately, exist where people do not react properly to views they oppose, even extreme views. The man with the hat may strike some people as an extremist. Many people these days seem to feel people should not say, or display, controversial things. But too much mocking, too many calls to muzzle the ideas, and some clown may get a martyrdom he or she does not deserve.
A few years ago, Don Imus, the famous “shock jock,” lost his radio show for referring to a New Jersey college women’s sports team with a racist term. Another fool made a martyr. The twist here is that the then-governor of New Jersey, John Corzine, was injured in an auto accident on the way to an emergency meeting over the incident, over what were basically hurt feelings. This would never happen with Governor Christie. He would be caught in a traffic jam his aides staged.
A rich entrepreneur in California once came under fire for comparing the Nazi hatred of Jews to the unpopularity of the rich 1% in this country. Talk about overblown and tasteless analogies. This is how he ended a letter to the editor complaining about the unfair press the rich are getting. He made some arguable points, about the assault on free speech from the left. But he goes on to compare critics of the rich to the Nazis. His particular example, Kristallnacht, seems to say that this open act of the Holocaust was showing public hatred of the Jews. This program was actually government organized. Don’t muzzle this guy, though, let him look like a fool, and point out many flaws in his argument. (How much actual violence was directed against the rich during the Great Recession?) Don’t make yourself look foolish responding to an idiot. Let fools argue against themselves.
A recent episode in Kansas is astounding, even under today’s bizarre college behavior standards. A female Kansas college professor, a white woman, is the target of student wrath for using her First Amendment Rights, and the academic freedom she thought she had. At least one graduate level education student seems to believe that questioning whether racism really exists—when the professor seems to have actually said she has not seen it on a particular college campus—is perpetuating racism, not to mention demeaning, insensitive, etc, rather than just plain wrong. This sort of thing makes me shudder for the future of the First Amendment and freedom of expression in this country. The amendment protects all of us by allowing people to say racist, demeaning, insensitive, and downright stupid things. The n-word, which the professor used as a general example, not a directed insult, is never appropriate. However, her never having seen racism and saying so, was seen as more offensive.
Her students now want to have the professor fired for hurting their feelings. I shudder for future students of these teaching students if they want to express a thought with which their teacher disagrees.
And then there is Donald Trump.
Have we all forgotten that the First Amendment was designed to protect unpopular, unpalatable, views? This is still the best way to encourage the free debate which is part of an effective democracy. Some crazy ideas later are accepted. Voting rights for women was quite controversial at the start, almost as way out as the abolition of slavery. It is not the dumb ideas of celebrities and, alas, political leaders that are worth supporting. It is the right of people to make fools of themselves. Because when you permit public stupidity, you also permit free debate, the free exchange of ideas that may even produce better ideas. And, maybe some dumb ideas might not be so dumb.
If we ever have the misfortune to get another constitutional convention, I expect to see the part of the Second Amendment about the right to bear arms put in the preamble, and the First Amendment to read “Congress shall make no laws abridging freedom of speech, unless someone finds the speech hurtful.”
Let us hope the examples that make the news, particularly from higher education, are not typical, that we have not raised a younger generation hyper-sensitive, self-indulgent and narcissistic, with no sense of history. This detracts from them being able to solve the real problems facing the United States and the world today.
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