​COLUMN: When did everybody forget the definition of freedom?


opinion

People seem to take freedom for granted here in the United States, which I find both hilarious and frightening.

When we speak about foreign affairs, we wave the stars and stripes, beat our chests and proclaim to the masses we’re oozing with the kind of freedom other countries wished they had.

When it comes to domestic freedom, the attitude seems a bit out of place.

How many stories have you heard about a person or a group proclaiming their freedom of speech is being infringed only for you to look at their case and agree with the silencing force?

It seems everyone has forgotten that the First Amendment was not created to protect favorable or popular speech; it was created to protect the outliers, the unfavorable rabble-rousers and the folks who were mad as hell and weren't going to take it anymore.

The neo-Nazi offering hateful pamphlets on a street corner has the same amount of protection as a local resident peppering his lawn with political campaign signs.

However, unless you’re from the homeowners association, not many people will ask the government to do something about the resident and all his awful signs.

Disagreeing with or not liking what is being said has not — nor has it ever been — an acceptable excuse for squashing a person’s right to speak freely.

In a recent example, Northern Michigan University administrators and The North Wind’s board of directors went full stupid and voted not to rehire the paper’s faculty adviser or the only candidate for editor-in-chief for the terrible sin of wanting to publish real news.

If you don’t let a newspaper pursue stories as it sees fit, be it aggressively or otherwise, you end up with non-important fluff that could only be improved upon by offering readers a free coloring book if they take a selfie and tweet it #readingdatnews.

The University of Michigan canceled, and then within 24 hours uncanceled, a screening of “American Sniper” after several hundred students protested it. The students claimed the movie did not fit with the university’s core beliefs.

The group could have easily protested the screening to get its message across, or encouraged other students not to go. Instead, the group chose the nuclear option and briefly had the screening canned.

Never forget, freedom of speech was put in place to foster new ideas and encourage meaning full debate.

To kill speech we don’t like is to halt our culture at the gates of progress, leaving us with only the dreams of what could have been as we stare through the gate and glare at the fields of mediocrity we know as the status quo.

With this freedom, there will be a lot of terrible, ill-informed, prejudicial ideas floating around, but that’s just the price of admission if you want to live country that calls itself free.

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