Friday’s Opinion page was a jolt of revelations. 1) Winning a $759 million lottery can result in a curious traffic jam of relatives and long lost friends in cars — the preferred transport of our times — heading in your direction.
2) You can discern which chants disturb you by knowing whose side you are on. Anger is tough to reconcile, but it is what you must acknowledge you feel when your lovely world view clashes with what is “universally wrong.”
3) If a tree falls on an uninhabited island, would there be any sound? And, by the way, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Free speech is claimed by many, and can be a clamorous, stomach-churning thing that unsettles our carefully comfortable reality. Would speech be heard better if it does not come in high decibels and angry intimidating slogans? The perceptions of threat can be elicited when we feel our ideas and safety are challenged, even without the bad props like torches and snarling faces and various projectiles.
When black people demonstrated peacefully like Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s for what you may think today are simple, unquestionable, basic human rights — the same seat on a bus or a toilet — they were met with an overwhelming resistance based on fear of upsetting the comfortable reality of the dominant white society. Did the right to free speech depend on which side you were on?
Can our minds distinguish peaceful speech of incendiary ideas from “hate” speech accompanied by threats of violence? Can violence be calculated to prevent thought, as well as to shut down speech?
Finally, to put things in a more tasty perspective, you can celebrate midsummer with stone-fruit pies.
Kit Sang Boos
Northampton