Where does the World get off telling us Americans to cool it with the hate speech? Who does the World think they are? Trying to alter our relatively young nation into the likes of China, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Korea, Russia? I don’t think so! Free speech is what makes this country great. And it’s what makes us unique. It means we Americans can say whatever we want (almost) whenever we want. So take that, World! We can say “I hate (fill in name/race here)” or “All those (fill in ethnic/religious group here) are idiots” and even “Down with the president”—and no one can cart us off to jail. Let’s not forget this is not the case throughout most of the world. Isn’t free speech the most fiendishly wonderful right a human being can ever have? It cuts like a knife sometimes, but freedom-loving Americans wouldn’t have it any other way. See, to make it in this country, pal, you gotta put up with a lot of talk.
Sigh.
After the violent and deadly Charlottesville rally between white racists and their self-proclaimed moral opponents, leaders of Planet Earth got together and put out a warning to America and Americans: Stop the hate speech. No way! We can say “I hate racists” or ask “Who would attend a White People Matter rally?” and my personal favorite “You all can go straight to hell.” Being American means we can mouth off. Just watch our movies and TV shows, since the ’30s. But being an American means we have to put up with a lot of ideas out there that collectively and wholeheartedly we don’t believe nor support. Yet we acknowledge the hateful among us have just as much right as the love crowd to say their piece.
Problem is … hate is like a communicable disease. It spreads from mouth to ear and infects the mind. It has spread like wildfire over the internet worldwide. You know, love speech can infect humans, too, even turn wretched lives into beautiful productive people. But these days, hostility is on the rise in America with huge numbers of people that just aren’t happy looking for a dissimilar yet smaller group of humanity to blame—such as blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans to name but a few pulled from the very old dusty list of America’s yesteryear. And, by the way, lovers don’t make good, loud, obnoxious fighters. They’re busy taking care of their own personal family unit of two or more. Niceness doesn’t make good news copy or video images either. So nowadays, opposing sides lash out. It’s all the rage. Peace remains elusive, and diplomacy has left the building, nationally speaking. The very word, the very idea, has been kicked to the curb … for the time being.
The whole world is watching
The World knows better than Americans how words can kill. We’d like to think words don’t hurt. We might even agree guns kill but not speech. We were raised on the smarty-pants ditty: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” The mature among us, however, know very well how malicious words—repeated in vicious tones by a crowd (in or outside the mind) on the street, from the internet, around schools or in the home—can and do kill, sometimes the very cause of a self-inflicted death among the very young.
History records how words can and do kill every time. It seems with every generation, one lone charismatic big mouth grabs power and before the World can stop him, it’s all-out war. Been a long time since Hitler did just that, leaving Europe decimated and millions of people dead, lives ruined, and survivors left to carry on as if nothing ever happened. The generation that lived through it is practically gone from the planet.
The reason why the World is getting all up in our business these days is not only because of worldwide terrorism ignited by hate speech in places of worship but also because of what happened relatively recently in, say, Rwanda. During the 1990s, the Hutu, an ethnic majority, went on a hostile bloody murder spree to rid their country of a minority called the Tutsi, leaving close to a million dead. All that upheaval started when hate speech was broadcast daily on radio. A man with the fervor of an evangelical preacher can allure ears and minds, especially impoverished and uneducated minds, minds that don’t check facts or consider all sides of every issue, minds in a society that does not cultivate empathy. In no time, the little country was at war as the Hutu used hatchets to slash and kill: genocide over mere words and deep-seated hate, animosity and jealousy among the majority toward a minority. Add free guns (another American right), a large number of sociopaths (look it up, America leads the world) and other unchecked mental illnesses with violent tendencies, and the World can clearly foresee how our nation is becoming a boiling pot unwilling to melt and blend—like we used to sing about with pride back in our school days, like we figured out how to get along and live in peace, like we had learned the lesson “Live and let live,” like we could lead the World. And we did.
The World, bless its heart, must mean well telling us Americans what to do when it comes to our government-sanctioned free speech rights at rallies. The World’s a-worryin’ ’bout us Americans, not unlike an adult sister fears the danger her wild younger sibling might get into if not more careful—always nagging us to think before we speak. Perhaps America is like a surly adolescent who just won’t listen, too cocky and brash to believe the elders who say our country could erupt in civil war again.