How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness! 

– Herodotus, as quoted in Plato’s “The Republic” 

We are only human. And so, it is often not until we lose something that we find how much we needed it, or valued it.

It can be little things. A treasured keepsake, filled to the brim with memories.  A photograph, or a book.  But though those things can be lost, we can endure and continue on.

It can also be significantly more important things. For instance, the lessons, advice, and experiences of your elders are often too late recognized for their significant value.  The passing of a pet who has shared its days with you will be remarked every time your pattern of behavior reminds you of the loss.  The loss of a loved one, a partner in life, is often compared to having a piece of your soul torn away.  Instead of items, things, material goods, these are losses of love.  And as humans, those losses are hard to bear, and they often make us yearn to stretch our hands out into the void, if only to pull these loved ones back.

Some things, once lost, cannot return. And those things we cherish most, which are such intricate parts of our lives, nearly cripple us with their absence.

At the same time, some things are mainstays of our lives which we have grown accustomed to, and expect. Like the air we breathe, and the sunlight in which we warm ourselves, some things are a part of our human experience.  To lose those things, after living with them all of our lives, would be a shock to the system.  As humans, we routinely take them for granted.

For a significant part of human history, there has been a concept which has grown and stagnated like the ocean tides. As indicated above by Herodotus and Plato, that concept is freedom of speech.  And as Euripides wrote in “The Phoenician Women”: To fear to speak one’s thought is to be a slave.

How can it be otherwise? To each of us has been granted intellect, and corresponding experiences which are only ours.  Not a single human thinks the exact same way as another.  Common ground and agreement can be found routinely, but each individual has their own individual thoughts.  Thought, and freedom of expression and speech, is therefore as much a part of our human experience as a beautiful sunset or the sensation of a late summer rain on one’s skin.  To have individual thought and ideas, to be an entity of your own making, is certainly what it is to be human.

We have been granted human intellect and conscience; how could it ever be stolen away from us?

This, too, humans have taken from granted.

Throughout history, kings, emperors, churches, dictators and autocrats, and various others in positions of power or supreme judgment have curtailed, restricted, or banned the freedom of speech and expression. You may say whatever you please, so long as you do not say that.  You may read whatever you please, so long as you do not read that.  You may write whatever you please, so long as you do not write that.  You may express yourself freely, so long as you do not express yourself in these ways.

Is that freedom?

Do a few links of chain slithering toward our ankle threaten to bind us?

It is not freedom.

And it does not require many links to bind a person against their will.

It is therefore happy providence that our American experiment began with the protection of this freedom. In 1791, our United States Constitution was amended for the first time, and in this First Amendment were enshrined our rights to freedom of expression and speech.  The very first amendment!

The founders of our nation had experienced their own restrictions in speech and expression. In 1722, Benjamin Franklin wrote to the New-England Courant, under the pen name Mrs. Silence Dogood, quoting the London Journal after his brother was jailed for writing critically of the government:

Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know. This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.

So too believed our first President, George Washington, before his presidency, in 1783:

If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

However, this ‘sacred Privilege’ whose absence could lead to an overthrow of ‘the Liberty of a Nation’ and lead us ‘to the slaughter’ need not come upon us suddenly. Instead, as James Madison said in 1788 in support of ratification of our Constitution, ‘silent encroachment’ is the true villain:

Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations . . . .

Volumes and tomes fill libraries around the world, containing the words of our founders and their inspirations in relation to the freedom of speech and expression. But of the many rights of the people, the freedom of speech and expression fights on to this day.  Justice William Douglas recognized this history in a dissenting opinion in 1952:

The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.

Justice Douglas would then say, in 1952:

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

But who could suppress this freedom? The government, certainly, and the government is formed (or should be formed) by the will of the people.  Candidates for office present their ideas and their beliefs, and the voting populace selects those who they wish to represent them in our republic.  Thus, most often, the government represents the majority.

And, at times, the majority shall operate and act in contravention of the rights or beliefs of the minority.

It is into this dynamic that American citizens and the courts must thrust themselves. When the majority seeks to abridge the freedoms of the minority, the courts are often the obstacle the majority must overleap to achieve their goal.  And should that barricade fail, the onus falls upon the people.

Failure to stop the majority from overwhelming the minority, then, creates its own problems. We reach back again to the speech of James Madison in 1788: 

[O]n a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes.

And by no means is this fear one that is locked in the past. Another President, Harry Truman, said to Congress in 1950:

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

We can see the path laid out before us, should a power once again seek to restrict the freedom of speech and expression. It can begin with small things.  In fact, that is the most effective way to impose restrictions.  You allow the people to adapt to the small change.  And then, once adapted, you introduce a little more change.  Inoculated as they are, they adapt again.  Soon, the restrictions surround the people, and before too long, it is too late.

Often, these changes have allies, allies who support and compel the change even though it can and would be used against them. Those of a differing opinion are made out to be strange, or ‘other.’  There is an appeal to simplistic thought and comfort, and divides between cultures and people are teased open further.  Soon, the larger group is made to feel that they are in the right; they are the majority, how could it be otherwise?  And then, the alliance being secured, the restriction of freedom commences.

Here too is a danger, as Judge Learned Hand indicated:

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, becomes a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent.

And so, we come to the events of the modern day, and now look with disapproval upon the words and acts of our fellow citizens.

Not so long ago, an American football player looked at his country and was impacted by the events he watched on his television or his phone. The facts supported his belief: Black Americans are often killed by police officers in questionable circumstances.  He was an athlete with a national stage, should he choose to claim it.  He had an opportunity to make a statement, if he wished to do so.

His mode of protest would take place before the beginning of football games. A military veteran advised him that the most respectful form of protest during the playing of the national anthem would be to kneel.  And so he did.  He didn’t turn his back, or gesture rudely, or do some other outlandish act.  He, quite simply, kneeled.

And this, the majority did not approve. The football player’s allies tried to direct the conversation, and the message.  Look at the events he is protesting!  Look at the ‘why’!

But the majority made a more effective argument. The football player was disrespecting the flag.  He was disrespecting the anthem.  And thus, he was disrespecting America.

Quickly the message and the game changed. The majority did not understand, or did not have the inclination to understand, the message behind the act.  Instead, they were told its purpose was quite clearly to disrespect the United States.

As more players knelt, more anger rose.

In the cruelest irony, the symbols of our freedoms were used to attack the exercise of those freedoms.

The proper response would certainly have been for the football league and all the wealthy owners to come together to say that instead of disrespecting the United States, the football player’s actions were an exercise of the rights granted to all by the United States, and though many may disagree with the message and the medium, all have a right to peaceful protest.

This, the league and the owners did not do.

This, our government leaders, and our President, did not do.

Instead, the majority sought to quash the protest. The majority sought to silence the speech, and the expression.  Employers have always been able to restrict their employees in the course of their duties.  But now, a President of the United States called those who knelt, and exercised their American freedoms, ‘sons of bitches.’  The majority roared approval.

Now, a President of the United States demands that the athletes stand for the anthem, and that if they do not stand, perhaps they should not be in the country. Perhaps failure to stand, failure to be suitably ‘patriotic,’ should be grounds for deportation.

For exile.

How do you not scream? How do you not grow hot with rage?

How?

To borrow a phrase from a far better man, whatever you do to the least of my fellow citizens, you do to me. If the President, with the awesome power of the office, should seek to restrict the freedom of expression and speech of those with whom he disagrees, he abridges my freedom.  When the government tells a person to be silent because they disapprove of what they say, they attack my freedom.

As Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote in The Friends of Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

If one cannot stand with the oppressed, one will find that none shall stand for them. And so, we must all stand together, or we shall all most assuredly be broken separately.

Peaceful protest is a hallmark of American freedoms. To be sure, peaceful protest is often met with violent opposition.  Hateful words meet hateful acts as those who protest are told to be silent.  Now, these athletes who would protest are told to hide their protest behind closed doors, or be fined for public protest.

Peaceful protest should be the inverse of prayer. Prayer need not be public, and present before the faces of the masses.  Its effectiveness is in privacy.  Protest, however, must be public.  It must be able to make others uncomfortable.  It must upset the status quo.  Otherwise, what benefit is there to protest?  Why have a freedom to protest, when the majority shall not let you?

As George Orwell wrote, If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

It is time to declare with one voice, with the freedom granted to us by our Constitution and by our makers, that we will not stand for this. We will not begin the slippery slope of allowing a restriction here, an abridgement there.  We cannot allow the community to dissolve.  We cannot allow the republic to transform into despotism.  Our American history pleads with us, with speeches and letters and publications to fill libraries, to refuse to take this first step on an ever darker path.  We shall regret the loss of this freedom, once we have discovered that it is gone.  And, like losing a loved one, a piece of our soul, a piece of our god-granted fundamental rights, will be torn away, leaving us crippled.

It seems we have been taking our freedoms for granted.

We must use our freedoms to preserve our freedoms.

To do anything else would be to disrespect the United States.