America is a hot mess.

Conceived with two of  the greatest foundational documents in history on the principles and means to “redress grievances”, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with its associated Bill of Rights, the country instead has determined to dissolve itself into a morass of retribution and moral incoherence.

Faced with the realization of a concluded verdict on an electoral process that transmogrified into the mother of all sorriest excuses for electoral integrity, a randy group of self absorbed “protesters” acted upon their outrage, predicated on the thinnest of veneers of understanding of the above rights , to invade the capital building and pathetically try to overturn the result.  Their deluded president, convinced that what was obvious to him should be obvious to all, railed against the legitimacy of the process that for more than two hundred years has maintained the stable and peaceful transfer of power associated with the world’s oldest democracy.

What we are now left with is a hot mess. A emboldened congress with the weakest of mandates nevertheless feeling empowered to blow up the documents that have served us so well in times much harsher than the current one.  Can’t cotton the current President? Impeach him again.  Don’t recognize the damage done to the confidence of the voter by destroying the link between the integrity of the vote and the will of the people? No matter, make the offending processes permanent.

Most grievous of all, offended by the thoughts of others to disagree with your opinion, make the contrarian opinions disappear.  Make their platforms for expression disappear.  Make their words and ideas invisible.  And if possible, isolate, humiliate, and ostracize from the perfected society.

It’s this last unpardonable sin that will outlive all the emotional immaturities of the current mood.  Freedom of expression, freedom of speech itself is the bedrock of what elevates humanity from the other species.  Discourse, however objectionable and at times painful, is what sentient, thinking  beings do to solve problems, improve understanding, and avoid conflict.  It is the most precious jewel of the freedom of man, and stands for that singular reason in the very first statement of inalienable rights and the first principle of the declaration of rights in the constitution.  It is the core of what stands to protect all from what Churchill so perfectly tomed as the risk of “sinking into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister and perhaps prolonged by the lights of perverted Science.”  Our current world stands at such an abyss, where small groups of elites feel empowered to censor, silence, dismiss and if necessary remove any opinions that does not fit their world view.  On colleges, debates have been removed for their supposed power to injure the sensitive and intellectually vacuous  who can not tolerate dissent from another’s  truth. In academia, history is being rewritten to intrepret actions on modern prejudices rather than as a mechanism to better understand ourselves  from our accumulated past.  On social media, voices and their thoughts are banned by “committees for the public good’, so powerful that the President of the United States was banned from defending his views.  In Congress, “science” on social justice, climate change, and individual speech will soon be settled.  Sites like Ramparts may find themselves no longer able to articulate a defense of “western civilization” without civic minders determining acceptable content.  The Orwellian world, once thought science fiction, is upon our doorstep.

If we let it happen.  If we don’t recognize that what is lost in our recent travails is not a labile, undisciplined populist and his temporary hold on the bully pulpit, but access to the very rights that allowed this man to speak his peace, and the rest of us to think and contemplate our place in the world and our future against other versions. Strength does not come from fearing another’s views or ability to persuade, but rather our ability to think for ourselves and push back if need be.

Christopher Hitchens was an irascible atheist with contempt for those who feelings were hurt when he spoke his mind, but we miss him now more than ever because he was a warrior for free speech and could articulate better than most why even the most hateful speech protects the search for the noble and the ultimate truth.  The video below is worthy from beginning to end as a raw introduction to free expression.  Prepare to be insulted by Mr. Hitchens and his,at times,  nasty opinions about religion. He would have it no other way if it stimulated you to read more, think more, converse more, and ultimately express why his views miss the eternal truth that sources the happiness he always searched for and never found.  Let’s return to learning what we need to know, and confront the current tyranny against expression.  It is, ultimately,  an age old tyranny as fragile and frail as the comfortable lies it attempts to sustain. It will strengthen our resolve and our confidence for what we now see clearly as the great  challenge of our time.