Tuesday, November 20, 2007

SHOCK JOCKS & FREEDOM OF SPEECH


Shock Jock, Don Imus is back on radio, December 3. Hurray for the freedom of speech victory!

Not.

In the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, we citizens gave ourselves one of our most valued rights, freedom to speak our thoughts as individual persons and to assemble and speak out corporately. That amendment also gives us the freedom to speak religious thoughts and to commit our thoughts to more permanent and public written forms.

Very often, those who push hard at the envelope of socially acceptable speech appeal to their rights based on this amendment. But envelope pushers such as raunch radio icons like Don Imus, pop musicians broadcasting vulgar and demeaning lyrics, or, for that matter, anyone spitting insulting and injurious words, are lousy free speech role models.

Sure the 1st amendment protects that kind of speech, just as it does the increasingly foul speech that infects so much of our daily conversation, even with children. But just as surely, refusing to self-censure the thoughts and ideas that enter our heads smothers the more important aspect of this amendment; the freedom to wisely govern ones own speech.

Freedom of speech is not only the freedom to choose what we will say, but also the freedom to choose what we will not say.

You’d think we would instinctively catch this as we grow into adulthood. It’s small children who indiscriminately blurt out whatever enters their little heads. That’s why kids say the darnedest things. And the most embarrassing things! But somewhere in the evolution of our culture, we seem to have lost the ability to develop the filter gizmo that is supposed to grow somewhere between our brains and our mouths.

Our generation seems to have left behind the advice of Abraham Lincoln. He said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” The more we speak and publicly record whatever dribbles into our minds, the more foolish we have become.
Our lopsided focus on free speech as saying everything we *@#&@ well please, sets us on course to growing legal restrictions on speech. And of necessity such rules are vague and consequently dangerous.

The danger begins innocently enough. In the process of redressing rigid and sometimes silly self and social censorship in our Victorian past, instead of recalibrating our internal filters, we gradually allowed them to decay until they became completely useless. So we not only give ourselves the freedom to openly discuss the facts of sexuality but ended up hip hopping about “doin” the “hos” or degrading a women’s basketball team as a bunch of the same.

Our insistence that free speech gives us the right to not filter our thoughts, poisons every sphere of culture. We don’t just debate political ideas, we demonize politician’s character. When another person inconveniences us, we feel obligated to generously offer a piece of our minds. Even in our religious institutions, though we use more pious words, we free ourselves to verbally cut and slice one another.

Writing about the Imus affair, Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, lamented, “In the end, it's all about public standards, and the fact is that we hardly have any anymore.”

Without giving adequate weight to free speech as freedom not to speak any and every thought, we resort to the legal authorities to protect those we perceive to be especially vulnerable to verbal brutishness. Thus the rise of hate speech regulations in universities and corporations around the country.

And with the advent of such language rules we wade into a dangerous legal quagmire sure to wreck much havoc on our 1st amendment rights. This is a cure worse than the disease. And an unnecessary one. That is, if the American people, said to be self governing, will in fact begin to govern their own speech, on their own.

It’s time to once again embrace the old truth, ‘everything entering the brain does not need to gush out the mouth.’ It’s time to reinsert the filters! We might begin with just a basic one. Nothing too complicated. Perhaps Model 429.

This model originates in ancient Christian spiritual wisdom, though any religious or irreligious person will find it useful. It’s found in the New Testament, Ephesians 4:29.

“Don’t use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them.”


Not a bad filtration system for the new Don Imus show.

Grammy winning rapper, Chamillionaire, discovered this ancient wisdom quite by accident. He’d decided to clean up his language but still reserved for himself the right to use the N-word insisting, "I've always used the N-word." That is, until one concert this past year when he noticed a mostly white audience lip-syncing his own word back to him! Something clicked.

"I was like, 'You know what? I'm not going to say the N-word on this one because when I go back on the road, and I start performing, I don't want them to be saying it, like me teaching them.'"

Would that all of us realize the negative force of our own freely chosen words and take at least one step toward freely limiting our words to the good and helpful ones.

(comments welcome - responses not guarenteed)