What freedom means

In Paris on Tuesday evening, hundreds gathered in a public square and held pens and pencils aloft.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

They stood for freedom of written expression. They stood for freedom of the press. They stood against murderous fanaticism.

Hours before, Islamic radical terrorists--or mere thugs in service thereof--had executed 10 satiric journalists. These satirists had made fun of the terrorists' worshipped one--just as these satirists also had made fun of others' worshipped ones, including the prevailing worshipped one in America, not to mention convention itself and authority itself.

Offensive, outrageous and irreligious satire, something beyond what normally gets practiced in the less secular and more puritanical United States, is a proud and ancient French tradition.

Meanwhile, in middle America, an old newspaper hack beheld on television these noble Parisians in the cool evening air holding high these symbols of free press. He brushed away a small, quick collection of moisture in the corner of his eye.

About the worst thing that ever happened to him was a foul letter to the editor. That is to say that about the worst thing that ever happened to him was somebody else's skyward-held pen or pencil.

The horrid news from Paris put me in mind of matters I recalled having been forced to ponder in September 2009. I was asked to give a speech on the "burden of freedom" at a Constitution Day event at the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith.

That assigned topic, by assuming freedom to be a burden, was bold, insightful and prescient.

So I retrieved the article about the speech that appeared in the Times Record at Fort Smith. This is the relevant part:

"'Freedom is not all it's cracked up to be ... and it's not a human instinct,' he said. 'We're not all that much for it, when you get right down to it.'

"Calling fear 'the scourge of liberty,' he said one of the greatest burdens of freedom is the struggle to get past our fear and have the courage to exercise our freedom.

"As a case in point, he cited a Yale University Press official's decision to publish The Cartoons That Shook the World this fall without reproducing the cartoons being discussed. In the book, Brandeis University professor Jytte Klausen analyzes the politics surrounding the violent Muslim reaction when cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad were published in a Denmark newspaper in 2005.

"'The point is, freedom of the press is wonderful, but it ain't easy,' the columnist said.

"'Enduring all the nonsense and racket of free speech is another burden of freedom when our natural impulse is to say, 'Shut the you-know-what up,' he said."

Rereading that now forces me to consider that it was much easier to pontificate about fearless freedom in September 2009 in Fort Smith than it is to exercise it in Paris in January 2015--or, for that matter, in Washington, where U.S. Rep. Steve Womack of Rogers demonstrates the difficulty.

On the day of the massacre, he announced that he would renew his effort to put an amendment on our otherwise freedom-granting U.S. Constitution that one no longer would be free in this country to desecrate the national flag.

To criminalize an act of protest against a nation is to validate the protest. To let it happen is to prove both the absurdity of the protest and the greatness of the nation.

The real threat to freedom is in how we react to terror against it.

And the real challenge of freedom is that its context must not be limited to our individual right to it, but extended to everyone's. We must respect and defend others' exercise of it as much as our own, even if we know theirs to be inane or offensive or irresponsible or vulgar or blasphemous or even dangerous.

When one of the talking heads on CNN said that we should support free press, but also be smart enough not to insult the prophet ... well, he tiptoed perilously along a fine line between being smart and being afraid, between one's own judgment and another's right to make a different judgment.

By the way: Fearless freedom also means accepting immigrants, even if they practice a religion claimed fraudulently by murderers.

It's easy and fashionable on an occasion such as this to use a quote often attributed to Voltaire: "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

Do we really mean that when we quote it?

It looks like we're going to have to find out.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 01/11/2015

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