Unless you've been trapped in a cave the last three weeks, you have probably seen the arm-waving and mud-slinging that two Post columnists have received from easily offended minority organizations, fuzzy-bearded professors and other assorted nuts. The Post is now Fox News
the fuzzy-bearded professors say. Joe Vance and Chris Yonker are racists and should be drawn and quartered the easily offended minorities say. If Joe Vance and Chris Yonker weigh more than a duck they are witches
say the peasants. Oh, wait. That's Monty Python and the Holy Grail. My mistake. After three weeks of seeing ignorant anti-free speech, pro-political correctness rants in The Post, I'm starting to confuse which groups of stupid people made which statements.
Last time I checked, this was America. And since this is America, I'd like to introduce you to my little friend. His name is freedom of speech. What Vance and Yonker said may have been offensive to some, but it's protected speech. Freedom of speech, and its cousin freedom of the press
is not in the Constitution for your comfort. In fact, freedom of speech is actually in the Constitution for your discomfort! Hearing new and different ideas is scary and sometimes painful. However, do you grow as a person and a citizen if you stop listening to other people's words, because you've found views that make you feel oh-so-sophisticated and enlightened? The answer is two letters long, and it starts with N and ends with O.
While I admit that I didn't find Yonker's controversial first column to be a knee-slapper, I also feel that I have to point out that the people who called him a racist, a fascist, or even'horror of horrors! ' a Republican sympathizer totally missed the point, and the joke's on them. People have certain buttons that set off a preset response, and in the case of the International Student Union, that button was Mexican. Press that button, and the indignant outrage center of the brain takes over. Unfortunately, when someone is in indignant outrage berserker mode, they have no idea how silly they look. Joe Vance's article is another story. On an emotional, gut-reaction level, I feel calling for the leveling of Iraq is extreme. However, when I say that, I prove that I'm not the patron saint of the keyboard, or otherwise infallible. I reacted to different, scary speech without thinking about it. That is Vance's problem: his ideas are so different, so scary, that people fail to give his ideas consideration. Instead, they compare him to Christopher Hitchens, George W. Bush, or Rush Limbaugh'the triune of demons in the Church of Feel-Good Liberalism.
People in general have a fear of the unknown and the Other. It's a fear that is ingrained in our primal consciousnesses, a leftover adaptation that was once useful, but not as much these days. That fear of the Other extends to the Other's ideas and beliefs. For the sake of brevity, let's term this anthropomorphic extension The Other's Idea. This venomous, hulking monster, the Other's Idea, is the mortal enemy of freedom and liberty. It wants us to reject it, to fight it, because its strength and evil increases as people fight it. It hopes that no one discovers that even as it defeats freedom, freedom can defeat it, through acceptance of different views and rational, logical debate. The Other's Idea is scary and dangerous. When dealing with other people, and when reading The Post opinion page, remember that the fear of different opinions is as scared of you as you are scared of it.
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Jesse Hathaway
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