Sound yours out............NOW!!
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death of your right to say it.” Voltaire
Speech is a glorious and wondrous thing. Nothing causes more trouble, changes more things, and creates more love, hate, sadness, anger, bigotry, acceptance, ill will and good tidings. And it's an integral and vital idea that this speech be free and flow like wine.
I'm not talking about child pornography or a burning flag or a man putting himself on fire. That can be free speech, but the freedom of speech I look to fight for is the right for you to say one thing, me to say another, we agree to disagree and keep on talking. What is the matter of which I write? Words, words, words! And, WORDS!
That marvellous exchange of syllables, consonants, vowels, stresses, rhymes, dictions, and the clicks of the tongue
from the mouth is what should be fought for above all else. And why should this battle be fought for such things to exist? Things that caused wars, caused tension, caused dissension, caused pain and unhappiness?
Because it is those very same things that created peace, created ease, created goodwill, created healing and joy.
Words revolutionize thought. Hear the barbaric yawp of Whitman and quiet your heart to listen to Eliot's love song, let Salinger whisk you away to Huxley's brave new world, go fishing with Melville (Fitzgerald and Hemingway can bring the drinks), visit the south and permit Faulkner to confuse you, allow Bob Dylan and the Beatles to tell the stories of the world, listen to Jefferson and Paine and Burke and Socrates as they tell the ways to liberty and to life.
Words create a sense of being. Without words, there'd be no ideas, no religion, and no way to identify you, no way to explain your love of someone or your hatred of someone. You couldn't do your grocery list, or your pros and cons of that special someone versus that other special someone.
The only way to ensure this continual revolution of thought, this sense of being, is that everyone be allowed to say what their revolution is, what their being is. You can disagree with me, you can agree with me, but speak it out! You have the same power, the same right I do! Whether it be me, that person next to you, or that fellow with the Confederate flag outside who sits on his porch, polishing his shotgun. Whether it is Charlton or Arnold, DiFranco or Dubya. The right to speak freely, to say one thing, is the only true way to be free and shall be worth dying for.
Those are just my words. What are yours?
MM
"It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are."
E.E. Cummings