Why I Hate “Free Speech” (Part II)
A Soldier's Reflections on the Price of the Freedom of Speech
It’s handy that “free speech” is concise and rhymes. It’s cool that it is convenient shorthand for some truly outstanding thinking about speaking. But, in so many ways, speech is so far from free that we do ourselves and each other a great disservice by characterizing speech as “free.” If we say it, we think it (one way or another). Thinking of speech in America as “free” is wrong in ways that should matter.
To put it plainly, “free speech” sounds like cheap speech. It sounds like it did and does cost nothing. But no speech worth anything ever was free. Speech that’s worth the most often has cost the most. Truth be told, it often cost as much as it possibly could. People often have paid the highest price possible for their speech. Very many people have fought long and hard on many fields of battle to earn and secure the freedom of speech. Speaking and thinking of speech as “free” makes it far too easy to forget how many fought, how hard they fought and how dearly they paid for what we deem “free.”
Anyone inclined to think of speech as free might be well served by getting out more. More Americans should visit Washington, D.C., and its many memorials and museums (and Kansas City’s World War I Memorial and Museum), which stand as impressive, inspiring and insightful monuments to those who paid an extreme price for what we call free. It is even easier to stop for a moment at one of the many monuments that stand in conspicuous and convenient locations in many American cities and towns. It’s well worth our time—to us as individuals, to those of us teaching young people what it means to be American, and to those of us who see America as beautiful—to stop and think a bit about the people and principles that make America beautiful.
In America, a monument to people who fought (with weapons or with words) is a monument to what they thought. That’s a vital aspect of America’s past and present. The United States of America was declared in 1776 and fought for (even before 1776) to protect principles and people, not king or parliament. Not king’s commands, but patriot’s writing led to the fighting that, in turn, secured the freedom to write. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Congress’s Declaration of Independence moved men to fight for their rights. Fighting for their rights moved people to write for their rights with a Constitution that We the People wrote, ratified and revised repeatedly.
Many monuments and memorials to the many men and women who fought for their and our freedoms proudly stand, but those that lie on vast swaths of land are at least as important and maybe more moving. When we’re inclined to call speech free, we should visit the massive cemeteries at Arlington and Gettysburg and those of World War II in France and the Philippines and those of our brothers in World War I from Australia and New Zealand at Gallipoli in Turkey.
Standing in such a cemetery on a quiet day toward the time the sun is setting, we might get an inkling of President Lincoln’s meaning in November 1863 in his humble antithesis of a victory speech to the nation after prevailing in great battles such as at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
Maybe in such a place and time, surrounded by silence and row upon row of miniature white marble canopies we can find true appreciation for the great price paid by vast armies for what many call free:
On Fame's eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,