By John Sykes
From Paul Greenberg in A Blow For Liberty:
Let freedom ring -- even if makes a wild cacophony. Restore us as in days of yore, the years of our youth, when liberty was young and the thrill of it wasn't yet gone, when this infant republic was already the hope of the world even if the world didn't know it.
Rekindle the Spirit of '76, when colonial pamphleteers flooded this still new country with their opinions, respectable or quirky, armed only with their utter conviction, printing presses, and trays of hand-set type, which might as well have been ammunition in their never-ceasing fights, often enough with one another. Let that old free-for-all have a new birth of life.
Let every voice be raised in raucous, uneven chorus. Voice your principles and convictions, Americans, and your crackpot theories and political manias, too. Give it your best shot, George Soros. Let us have it, Koch Brothers. Listen to Walt Whitman, one and all, and open your barbaric yawp.
The more genteel types among us keep saying that American politics is much too raucous these days. My own considered opinion is that it ain't near raucous enough. This country needs a new birth of freedom, and newborns ain't exactly quiet, passive types.
Yes, restore us as in the days of our youth. Listen and you can hear, in the divided and deeply felt opinions of all these justices, majority and minority, the sound of free Americans going at it citation by citation and claim after claim, and, off in the distance, the trill of a fife and rat-a-tat-tat of a drum playing Yankee Doodle Dandy. It's the sound of free, unbridled speech. And it's music to the ears.
Go to it, Americans. As if you lived in a free country.
Yes, we really need the taste of freedom that we all long for. End the lie of political correctness, and allow free speech and free thought. When I visit Europe, people laugh at the idea that America bills itself as the "Land of the Free". They point out that Americans are censored from expressing their personal views and ideas, and that we just smile and say we're having a great day when they can see in our faces that we are tense, apprehensive, and walking on eggshells so as not to say the wrong thing in a particular crowd or social setting. Inshort, to them Americans are phoneys wearing a mask so we look like and sound like everyone else.
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