All day long I’ve been checking comments and shaking my head and feeling distracted by this war happening online, on my space, so I didn’t get much work done.
Many of the comments are kind, but too many of them are not. So I sit down to my computer and get ready to fire back my responses. Something about how we should take care with our words and assumptions and especially strangers’ hearts.
My husband puts his hand on my arm. “It’s not worth it,” he says. “You can’t argue with people like that. You just have to ignore them.”
I scan the tirade one more time, and every single one of them pouring poison online holds up a “freedom of speech” card, claiming their right to share their opinion. And yes, it’s true. We do have the right to our own opinion. But just because we have the right to free speech and the freedom of expression, does that mean we should use it to air everything we think?
This is a harder question to answer.
///
When I was eleven years old, I stood outside the little Baptist church I attended on Wednesday nights and watched a friend play basketball with some of his older buddies.
Another girl watched, too. She had a crush on my friend, but he didn’t ever pay any attention to her, mostly because he had a crush on me. I didn’t see him as anything more than a friend, so I kept trying to bring them together. But my efforts didn’t work.
And there came a day when the youth leader called us all inside and the boys went one way and the girls went another, and my friend hugged me and said he was leaving early and wouldn’t see me again until school the next morning.
The girl was watching. The boys disappeared, and she turned to me and said, “You have a really pointy nose.” Then she walked away.
Maybe it wouldn’t have affected me as much if my dad hadn’t just left my family for another one. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as bothered if I hadn’t already been uncomfortable in my skin. Maybe I could have let it go if I hadn’t already been walking my way toward eating disorders and wishing I were different.
I can’t say for sure, because that wasn’t my reality then.
I tried to pretend her words hadn’t hurt me as much as they did. I tried to keep my fingers from tracing the shape of my nose. I tried to walk past the girls’ bathroom without ducking inside.
But I did go inside, and I stood looking at my nose in the mirror for five whole minutes, turning to examine it from every angle.
Yeah, I thought. Yeah, I see what she means. It is pointy.
If she thought it was pointy, how many other people did, too?
///
Even today, in my dark days, when I find myself unhappy with my appearance, her voice joins the others in their raucous chorus.
What does it matter? you might say. What does it matter what one little girl thought? What does it matter what other people think? You shouldn’t be so weak to care. You shouldn’t be so insecure about yourself that the words of another person can hurt you.
The problem is that we are all, at the heart of us, wired for connectivity. What exercising our freedom of speech and our right to our own opinions through personal attacks on other people does is it disconnects us from the human experience of community. It casts outside the circle the ones being attacked.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. It was the first global expression of the basic human rights all people could claim. Freedom of speech was added as Article 19 in 1949. Article 19 said that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
This idea of free speech and expression had been developing since the advent of the printing press. Traditionally, governments had limited printing opportunities to only those materials that the government agreed with. Because of this limitation, political ideas could not be freely debated.
Free speech and the free expression of ideas was originally a political, intellectual right, not a personal one meant to justify airing our opinion about everything.
Governments still restrict freedom of speech and expression based on the harm principle, which says that one’s freedom cannot be used to harm another. Some of those restrictions include libel, slander, hate speech, fighting words, and oppression. There are many others.
Article 19 also states that the freedom of speech and expression carries “special duties and responsibilities…for respect of the rights or reputation of others.”
This is the part we seem to have forgotten.
///
In college I worked as the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. There were a few rotating cartoonists who would publish editorial cartoons with us.
One night a cartoonist turned in his cartoon, and I immediately had a bad feeling about it. In the cartoon, a professor stood at the front of the class. A bubble above him said, “Blah, blah, blah.” The students around him all had hostile expressions on their faces. Some were sleeping. A few were throwing things at him. One, I seem to remember, had a gun, though I’m not entirely sure my memory hasn’t fabricated this detail, perhaps made the cartoon worse than it really was because of what happened later.
I called the cartoonist to see if he had anything else he could send me.
“Why?” he said.
Because this one didn’t seem very respectful, I said.
“It’s not a real teacher,” he said. “It’s just a joke. It’s a humorous opinion.”
He said he had nothing else to give me, and I was two hours from deadline with nothing else to fill the space.
So I let it run.
The next afternoon, when I got to my office, my voice mailbox was full. My email was inundated. People were outraged by the cartoon. It shouldn’t have run.
It seemed that everyone but me knew who the professor was, because even though the name had been changed in the cartoon, the picture, they said, was a dead giveaway.
I had to not only submit a formal apology for letting something so insensitive print in the paper for which I was responsible, but I also had to fire a really good cartoonist who’d probably just been annoyed at a teacher for some reason or another and decided to lash out in the best way he knew how.
Just because we have freedom doesn’t mean we should use it.
///
With this freedom comes great responsibility.
We are responsible for our words and whether they build up or tear down. We are responsible for the hearts of one another.
In this day of computer communication, with our ever-increasing ability to comment anonymously all over the Internet, we have gotten really good at firing off responses, without really thinking about how, at the other end of our words, there is a real, breathing person.
We can’t see their face. We don’t know much about their lives. We assume the parts that are missing.
It’s easy to forget our responsibility.
I don’t have a problem with a friendly exchange of ideas, with a person who can respectfully disagree with what I have to say, someone who makes a good effort to convince me of his or her viewpoint without feeling the need to make it personal. But when someone starts attacking me or the members of my family, saying destructive, hurtful, dishonoring things they have no way of knowing for sure, that’s when they have lost their ability and their right to communicate with me.
What freedom of speech really means is expressing our opinions or viewpoints in a way that does not damage other people or people groups. It means carefully weighing our words and running them through a filter—is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?—and only speaking when our words pass the test. It means seeking harmony and peace even in disagreement.
We cannot claim our right if we do not exercise our responsibility.
Freedom of speech has the ability to broaden our minds in astounding ways, introducing us to new ideas and uncomfortable viewpoints and enriching humanity’s full experience of life.
We just have to know how to use it.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Gerson Repreza on Unsplash)
