We are so used to grumbling about how it should be, or how we wish it was, or how it could be if only “they” would get with the program (pick your “they”), or how it once was (probably a romanticized version of the past) that we can forget that a lot of what is going on these days is awfully darned good. Yeah, there is room for improvement, but I am glad to be here, today, now.
Civil Liberties
Whatever Hits the Fan is Never Evenly Distributed
Consider a bullet. I had one sitting on my dresser as a kid – a Civil War Minnie Ball. Toss it into the air. It tumbles. It hovers, for a split microsecond, pointing at you as it falls. Consider that same bullet in 1862 (I found it on a farm near Antietam). Consider standing in front of the line of Blue (it was clearly a Yankee bullet) with your fellow Virginians. Consider that same bullet again. Fired from a Springfield, heading your way. Take a split microsecond, same length of time as before, and focus in on only the bullet. The situations are almost indistinguishable if looked at on a short enough time scale. The 1862 bullet points at you in the same way the modern one does. In that split microsecond, an observer who happened to just drop in and observe only the bullet would be hard pressed to decide which situation he or she’d rather be in. Practically the same mass of metal. Same shape. But look closer. The 1862 bullet should be warm – evidence of the kinetic energy stored in it. The present bullet should have a coat of oxidation. But there were bullets fired in 1862 that had been dropped in the crick the month before they were fired, and the modern bullet might have been sitting in the sun for a while. There’s always something for the naysayer to latch on to. But take another snapshot a couple of milliseconds later, and the difference between the two situations is instantly clear – the bullet in 1862 has traveled a lot further – and in a much straighter line than the arc of the falling bullet tossed from your hand. Now which situation would our hypothetical observer rather be in?
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Courage and Freedom of Speech
We’re covering freedom of speech now in Constitutional Law, and I found a couple of quotes that are particularly stirring, especially in light of the following column from Lenoard Pitt:
In 1989, photographer Andres Serrano exhibited a photo he called “Piss Christ,” depicting a crucifix submerged in urine. It raised a furor and was condemned on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Nobody was killed.
In 1999, artist Chris Ofili exhibited a painting he called “The Holy Virgin Mary,” in which the mother of Jesus has an exposed breast made of elephant dung. It drew a rebuke from the mayor of New York and crowds of protesters.
Nobody was injured.
Last year, a Danish newspaper printed political cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, one showing him with a bomb in his turban. There were weeks of rioting across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. At least one person died in Somalia, five in Afghanistan, a hundred in Nigeria. An untold number of people were injured. Property damage was in the millions.
You may think the point of the foregoing parallel is that Christians react more maturely to provocation than Muslims. You would be mistaken. After all, Muslims in America, surely as offended by the cartoons of the prophet as Muslims anywhere else, did not riot or kill. Their protests were confined to statements of anger and letters to editors.
No, the point has less to do with religion than with culture. As in, some cultures value freedom of expression more than others. Some realize the person who is not free to speak his or her mind is not truly free at all.
And some know courage is the price of that freedom.
And to salute that, I quote the following from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dissent in Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925):
Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker’s enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason.
And the following is from Justice Louis Brandeis’ concurrence in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927):
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
Islam right now is going through major growing pains, exacerbated by the difficulties of coping with modernity. As such, it is experiencing the same doubt that Americans must have felt when confronted with the Russian Revolution of 1919, and the subsequent Bolshevik triumph over Tsarist loyalists in the 1920s. Islam and its adherents feel beset on all sides, and is in very real danger of falling for the human temptation to silence critics rather than rebut the critics’ claims. If Allah smiles on the umma, courage rather than cowardice will have the last say in this generational struggle for civilizational identity.
It is also a reminder, to those of us in the West that have come through, not only to continue to support the courageous members of the umma, but also not to give in to our own darker temptations. Gitlow and Whitney were decided less than a century ago (although to Americans that is a long time), and the freedom of speech is still a litigated field. Let us not betray the hopes of Justices Holmes and Brandeis.
[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]
Kelo Update
It’s over.
The state of Connecticut has come up with an extra $2.1 million for the last holdouts in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood in New London, including Suzette Kelo. The town also decided to drop claims of $1.1 million of back rent from the people who refused to turn over their property. The Kelo house will apparently be jacked up and moved.
The intended beneficiary of this project is the Pfizer company. They are only a couple of hundred yards from the Kelo house, right on the water next to Ft. Trumbull (the Kelo house is directly behind Ft. Trubull). There is supposed to be a hotel, a small convention center, and the usual luxury condos. They had better hurry – Pfizer’s patent on Viagra expires in seven years, and there are no blockbusters in development.
I drove through the redevelopment area last week, and the situation was largely unchanged since I took these pictures (2 views of the Kelo house, the Pfizer campus, office space for lease, and Fort Trumbull from the ferry) last year. All the “Not for Sale” signs are down. There is an office park (with lots of space for sale or lease) on the north side of the area, but it looks like it is the result of the adjoining redevelopment of Shaw’s Cove. There is a lot of raw land. Even with clear title to most of the area, it does not look like an Oklahoma-style land rush is in process.
Another P.S. to an even older post
A theme of long-standing on this blog has been the weight of what is sometimes called “democide”, that seldom, if ever, is balanced by the deaths of war. And the fear of which permeates our lives in a way that war may – but often doesn’t. Mohammad of Iraq the Model, reporting on a blogging conference he attended in Cairo, notes that difference:
It may sound a bit odd but that’s really what I felt in Egypt that I don’t feel in my war-torn city; for the first time in 3 years I felt the restraints of government…I told one of my colleagues I feel safe in Baghdad despite the dangers, I may feel afraid of terrorists or random violence but I never fear the government and that’s not only how I feel, Iraqis are not afraid of expressing their differences with the authority because we in Iraq have more or less became part of that authority the day we elected our representatives while terrorists and militias are nothing more than temporary phenomenon that unlike constitution and elections have no solid foundations.
This distinction, of course, is one we understand & appreciate. (Original reference was to Atlantic Monthly; hat tip Instapundit.)