Free Thought 002

Free Thought 002 You know when I was young, I was told the greatest thing to be was to be an American. We had rights and liberties that no one could take away. I was told to be proud and I was, still am. But the America we live in today has fallen on hard times. No matter how bad things got, everyone, including myself, would say ‘At least we have free speech.’ We should be lucky this is something the rest of the world doesn’t have. But as I look out over the changing landscape, it seems that our free speech in America is going the way of the dinosaurs. Now free speech is seen as nothing more than a bother, something we need to get rid of and most of all, something that is problematic. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others, would prefer you just not have any ideas of your own. It is getting so bad that you can be harassed over ‘wrong’ thought. Now I ask you, who’s brilliant idea was it to try to censor thought? Speech and thought go hand in hand. When one falls the other one goes with it. If they end up getting rid of free speech, your freedom of thought will be close behind. It has already started. I can’t imagine living in a world where you can’t say whatever you want. Where you can’t put forth ideas and theories. Where even if they are wrong, the world might grow. There was a point where we thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. We now know that not to be true, but at the time it was criminal to say so. Can you imagine if we never let the astronomers and scientists make these discoveries because it went against the narrative or made somebody feel stupid or uncomfortable? This would have been horrible. But are we not doing the same thing right now? Are we not censoring people’s opinions? Even if they’re wrong they may hold pearls of wisdom. This is the problem with censorship. When you censor one thing, irreverently you censor everything. Discoveries, philosophy, inventions. These are all products of people freely voicing the question of ‘Can we?’ ‘Why?’ and ‘What else could we do?’ Those people out there who are pro-censorship will say, ‘all those things can still happen, we’re not censoring that.’ I say in response, ‘You most certainly are.’ If people can’t ask hypothetical questions, they can’t put out theories on subjects deemed ‘wrong thought.’ If people can’t think freely for themselves on any subject, then we as a society have truly hit our glass ceiling. We will no longer be able to advance do to our unwillingness to hear things that we don’t agree with or, and I say this with the absolute disdain of this word, to be ‘triggered’. My final words I will leave you with today is that even if something is uncomfortable, unpalatable, or down right offensive it still deserves the right to be spoken, because if we lose our free speech, it will be us that is truly lost. K. West