The Freedom To Express Hate

It is hard to imagine the Founding Fathers anticipating just how far we would eventually push our freedom to express whatever might be in our hearts and minds at any given moment. Many of them were rightly suspicious of their fellow human beings, enough to build into the Constitution all kinds of blocks to using power for purposes of self-aggrandizement. But they also believed that, in most instances at least, civility would triumph over impulsivity, that destructive feelings and attitudes could generally be tempered by rational discourse, that most people understood the difference between talking about doing bad things and actually doing them, and that it is generally a good idea to put voluntary limits on our expressions of feeling and thinking by cultivating a mindfulness of what serves our own and others' needs most constructively.

These thoughts came to mind the other day as I listened to a local radio station while coming back from teaching a class, and was told I had only two minutes to wait before the "noon flip-off," a time opened to listeners who wanted to call in and rail against whomever, for whatever reason, in pretty much any tone of voice and with almost any words they chose. Curious about what kinds of calls would come in, I kept the dial steady for a while, and actually heard a few well-argued complaints rather than just fulminations. For the most part, though, blowing off steam seemed the order of the day, and eventually I decided to exercise my own right to do a flip-off, by switching to the classical music I should have been listening to in the first place.

There is a lot of blowing off steam going on these days, far more, I think, than the Founding Fathers could have anticipated. The good thing about the eruptions is whatever may be harmful about them usually ends up dissipated into the air. The bad thing is that whatever may be valuable in them suffers the same fate. What I would like to think about the blowhards themselves is that more often than not they are left with an affective emptiness that they might be willing to begin filling with thought. Putting feelings in their place at least temporarily, they could get down to the business of what is really bothering them, whether their complaints have anything to them, whether they point to conditions about which all of us ought to be concerned, and whether, together, we might begin the really hard work of doing something about them, instead of merely blowing off more steam, and flipping more people off.

I am not as optimistic as many of the Founding Fathers were about the possibility of transforming the power of anger and outrage into the kind of thinking that ensures lasting change for the better. But I am still convinced that attaching the transformers to the synapses of anyone who will let us do it, beginning with ourselves, is still the best hope we have of making our God-given, Constitutionally-ratified freedom to express ourselves work in the way that it is supposed to work. One thing that made me especially frustrated as I listened to people flipping off each other the other day was that I could not get close enough to any of them even to begin to find out who and what they were really flipping off. In most cases, it could not have been who and what they were telling us; their feelings were far too intense, and their mental states far too confused, for their flip-offs to be taken at face value.

As are those of the noose-hangers around the country these days. Apparently, they have been at it for some time; most of us simply have not been paying sufficient attention, anymore than I have been paying attention to Confederate flags waving in my face, except to let them annoy me for a nanosecond or two. It may be that we are going to have to stand up more explicitly for Old Glory if the specter of a not yet completely buried Confederacy keeps on rearing its very, very ugly head. But for sure we are going to have to start untying nooses whenever we find them, and put the ropes to more useful work, like pulling people out of the poverty, discrimination, and diseases in which we have forced them to languish for far too long.

Standing up for our flag and untying nooses, however, cannot mean burning others' flags and hanging people with their own nooses. If we are to get anywhere with either, we will have to find out more about what the wrong kind of flag and the wrong use of rope is really expressing in the lives of those who are running so far afoul of Jesus' cautions against calling anyone a fool.