You are here: Home » Commentary » Op-Eds » Civility and Free Speech

Civility and Free Speech

 

It would seem from a variety of news pieces this week that those of us who cherish the civility of good manners may have hit our tolerance limit for “free speech”. First there was the “silence gun” out of Japan, which scrambles the brain circuits responsible for speech and renders the target silent. Then there has been the ongoing story of how Rush Limbaugh has finally been called out for crossing the line for calling a Georgetown law student a “slut” and a “prostitute”; he has been made to apologize (albeit reluctantly) and is bleeding advertisers from his radio show (7 at last count).

Today comes word of a Philadelphia vigilante by the name of Eric, who has been shutting down loud cell phone users on the city’s number 44 bus route with a cell phone jammer. While a lot of his fellow riders think he’s their hero, what he’s doing is unfortunately a federal crime punishable by jail time and a $16,000 fine, because of the potential to jam crucial emergency calls (the bus company assured the public that the communication systems on the buses themselves don’t use cell-phone technology and have always been impervious to this type of jamming). After the reporter for the NBC affiliate who talked to him advised him of that, he said that he would be getting rid of the device and would suffer through those obnoxious, loud cell phone calls again.

Being a cell phone user, I’m glad that my calls are protected, as I have used it several times for emergencies. As a person who is royally ticked at the lack of civility in our daily lives and our public discourse, I want to clap Eric on the back.

So here’s my current hobby-horse: the absolute disrespect shown to President Obama from every spectrum of our society. I would love to draw comparisons to President Reagan, but that wouldn’t work because he was beloved by all (if you believe that – there was a lot of speculation at the time that he was just reading from a script someone else wrote… and then it turned out to be true). Let’s hark back to President Carter, instead. He had his share of assailable newsbytes; he was a peanut farmer from Georgia; the hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Tehran happened on his watch and he refused to invade Iran; he admitted in an interview to “lusting in his heart”… oh, there were just so many of them, including the kamikaze duck.

HOWEVER, he was always President Carter. He wasn’t referred to in the mainstream media by just his last name or, God forbid, his first name. No one would have dreamed of saying anything about his wife as has been said about First Lady Michelle Obama. No one would have dared go so far as to suggest that his daughter be gang raped.

There are four factors to consider in this.

There used to be the belief that even if you did not respect the person sitting in the Oval Office, you still respected the office. This man was our president, had been elected by a majority of the people in the nation, and was our Commander in Chief. There was still, even after the debacle of the Vietnam War, that ownership and respect for our President. After all, the generations that were commenting and reporting at that time had been raised by parents who came out of two world wars, and we were raised to respect the president, right or wrong. That didn’t mean the duck wasn’t news, it just meant that no one got mean, nasty and vicious about it.

The second factor is that the Internet didn’t exist back then. There wasn’t really a forum where every Tom, Dick and Jane could spew any type of crap and do it anonymously.  The mainstream media was fed by actual reporters and correspondents who checked their facts before going public with a story. News organizations weren’t owned by Disney, they were either news divisions of the major networks or independent print newspapers. They got news feeds from respected sources like Reuters or the AP. They had reporters in the field. Commentary was limited to the editorial page, not headlines. News anchors were veteran reporters who had put in their time in the field, not someone hired because they had good hair or impressive cleavage. National news didn’t do many feel-good stories; you got those from your local news shows and your local papers. The people who were putting information out there for the public took responsibility for it, put their names and reputations behind it, and took seriously the reasons for the “Fourth Estate” (a free press) to exist at all. With the explosion of the Internet, blogs and comment streams have become the playground of conspiracy theorists, nutcases and just plain God-awful nasty people who feel they have a right (and they do) to spew any sort of crap into the blogosphere and not be held accountable for it. And our national news organizations are all owned by entertainment organizations or international media conglomerates that don’t have any sort of commitment to reporting the news accurately. They won’t even call out an interviewee for blatant lies.

Then we have the two factors that have led to all this incredible manure showing up in the blogosphere: bigotry and politics.

Unfortunately, after electing our first mixed-race President (please do remember that his mother was white), we have discovered just how racist this country still is. President Carter and his family are white. Aside from calling him a Georgia cracker, there wasn’t much to go with there. President Obama is a mutt (his own word), but called by everyone an African-American. His wife is undeniably black, as are their daughters. The racial slurs on comment streams, blogs and websites are mind-boggling. I was a child in the sixties, but I remember the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy (I remember JFK, if truth be told). A substantial proportion of the nation mourned Rev. King, and vowed to continue his work. The ones that didn’t kept their mouths shut on the national stage. Now we are seeing just how much racism still exists in this country, and it is both sickening and depressing.

But I said “bigotry”, not “racism” earlier. That’s because the other bigotry that has landed on President Obama’s head is religious. Yes, his biological father was raised Muslim and his stepfather was a secular Muslim, but his mother was raised as a secular Christian. Yes, he spent some of his childhood in Indonesia after his mother remarried, where he attended both a Muslim school for two years and then a Catholic parochial school for two years. He has refused to make official any kind of church affiliation now that he is in the White House, the first president to do so, but he was baptized as an adult into the Trinity United Church of Christ (our Founding Father John Adams was a member). He is a Christian. However, because of his fathers’ religious upbringing as Muslims, and his oh-so-not-Christian name of Barak Hussein, he is still being called a Muslim and has inherited all the misinformed anti-Muslim fear and bigotry that has grown out of 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the war on terror. So the claims of him being a closet Muslim and an advocate of Sharia law abound.

Finally, there is the sad fact that in our politics the concept of civility has disappeared. From the campaign trail and political ads that vomit bald-faced lies to the floor of Congress where politicians play chicken with our government, it has become a disgrace and an embarrassment. When the supposed leaders of our local, state and national governments are out there throwing the mud as far and as hard as the idiots on the comment streams, it gives those very idiots the license to do the same damned thing. A sitting governor would never have dreamed of being so crass as to get into the President’s face and shake a finger at him thirty years ago, at least not in public.

I want a return to honest reporting, respect for the President and his family, and civilized behavior. I’m tired of swimming in filth every time I read the “news” online, or sit through political ads on TV. Enough is enough.

Related articles

• Is the Philadelphia Cell Phone Jammer a Hero or Pest? (mashable.com)
• Cell phone jammers raise concern, FCC requests public comments (cbsnews.com)
• Cell phone jammer admits to ‘taking the law into his own hands’ (csmonitor.com)