Free speech is one of those issues, unlike gun control or abortion, that impacts every man, woman and child with equal thrust and protections. It gives us the ability to confront, analyze, bloviate, criticize and explore new ideas without the constraints of punishment if our speech is deemed offensive.
Two dummies to rule us all.
I don’t remember if I competed in a Spelling Bee as a youngster, but I can easily recall feeling like I was under a microscope, or trying to not embarrass myself in front of adults, or feeling cold sweat as a million pairs of eyes were disseminating me on the spot.
Having a black friend enhances my ability to understand what black people experience. Without his friendship I would be less informed, and therefore less likely to give credence to the idea that racism invades the emotional and sometimes physical space of people of colour.
All of us see evidence of this holy war every time we scan our social media news feeds, but most of us having become numb to its overall impact. We are becoming desensitized to this fight, watching like hopeless spectators huddled inside a gladiator arena, nervously waiting to see who the victor becomes.
Some conservatives may have an ideological soft spot for the deep cuts into social assistance, libraries, medical procedures, paramedics, education, and the environment, but other right of centre voters must be scratching their heads knowing that despite all those cuts Ford still spent billions more than Wynne.
We all instinctively understand we are getting stiffed. We instinctively know that those red and blue entities are social clubs of corruption and hypocrisy. We just don’t know what to do about it.
Many Canadians are not aware of just how systemic the threats of lawsuits are in this country. From my own experience, I have noticed they are used arbitrarily, mostly as a tool to scare critics from commenting publicly and almost all of them are without teeth.
If it is par for the course, if political operatives routinely sabotage, secretly record their enemies and engage in entrapment to further their parties’ or their own political ambitions, what does this say about public service in Canada?