“If we don’t speak now”
by Tabitha Korol
“Speak now or forever hold your peace” is based upon the marriage liturgy of the Christians’ Book of Common Prayer. Today it may refer to our self-monitoring for the irrational fear of not being politically correct.
After reading my essay, “An Assumption of Dignity” on the Internet, a reader commented, “I circulated it to our editorial board who found it very moving. However, based entirely on the reality of it not being ‘politically correct,’ I am recommending that it will not be posted on our educational site. That said, given its compelling nature, I will circulate it privately and selectively.”
This poignant communication appears to be from an academic, in a corporate or military milieu, who wants to share it but is constrained by a fear of being classified “intolerant”. In years past, he’d have thought nothing about forwarding and posting the article with his observations on said educational site. Today, in this post-Obama era, he is threatened by the vitriol that would explode were he to dispatch ideas antithetical to those of people who set the political agenda, intimidated by the possibilities that harm would come to his family, and concerned that he could be summarily dismissed from his position if the first two and harassed if the third.
Although our First Amendment remains unchanged, with its protections extended to all individuals in the United States, the writer nevertheless reasoned that sharing information contradictory to the views of the ruling class could offend and must be done surreptitiously and with extreme caution. He is judicious and self-monitoring, but feeling defenseless in his isolated position; he is slowly conforming to “the plan.” Guarded, he is gradually growing fearful of and more submissive to those in power.
The purveyors of hate-speech accusations work to divide us into groups based on their immutable features — race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, family breakdown, and views on innumerable subjects. They have always existed in history but are far more forcefully promoted by those who now hold sway over our schools, government, and the workplace. When these were still insufficient to more completely affect our massive population, the ruling class devised issues for additional divisiveness — climate, abortion and post-partum infanticide, American monuments and symbols, slavery and LGBTQ reparations, a unique foreign invasion, and so many more. And when our young adults leave the schools to join the mainstream of American life, they will take with them not only their learned prejudices, but also their ways of stifling the free speech of others who would dare to disagree.
The left has worked doggedly to insert their values into our lives, and because they use compassion as their tactic, traditional Americans failed to see that the compassion was highly selective. Compassion for the mother is denied the unborn child; compassion for the gender-confused is denied the healthy heterosexual; compassion for the Muslim newcomer is denied the indigenous Christian and Jew. We have even witnessed the compassion shown more for the criminal than for his victim in a court of law.
This selective compassion is denied our President, a man who serves his country selflessly, even donating his paychecks to worthy causes. Why does the Left rant about President Trump, insult his every sentence, mannerism, activity? For one thing, it serves to comfort the Left, to keep them engaged with trivia to dodge the discomfort of acknowledging his triumphs. For another, and perhaps the crux of the issue, is that when they cannot suppress his speech, they can still suppress what they hear. They impose their will on others by censoring what’s available to the public, such as on Google, Facebook and Twitter, and discredit the rest. The Shangri La for the left is when society is so controlled that it becomes self-censoring. We are almost there.
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