Thanksgiving 2019: Gratitude for Democracy in the U.S.
As a former print newspaper journalist, I am definitely in favor of the freedom of speech we have in the United States even when that speech is hateful. Yet I am even more in favor of people standing up to hate speech.
A heart-warming example of people standing up to hate speech occurred this week of November 2019 in the U.K. as reported in an Evening Standard article by Rebecca Speare-Cole:
A Muslim woman who has been hailed a ‘hero’ for confronting a man hurling anti-Semitic abuse at Jewish children on the London Underground said she “wouldn’t hesitate to do it again”.Asma Shuweikh, from London, stepped in when a man began reading anti-Jewish bible passages to two young boys in skullcaps while they were travelling with their family on the Northern Line.
The shocking incident was captured on camera by fellow passenger Chris Atkins who then shared the footage on social media.
What’s equally interesting about the article is this part:
The mother-of-two said she wished more people on the Tube had stood up the man when he started being aggressive towards the young family.
“I would have loved more people to come up and say something, because if everyone did, I do not think it would have escalated in the way that it did,” Mrs Shuweikh said.
On Thanksgiving this year we can all ponder this question:
In the United States where freedom of speech is an important right, do we individually stand up to people who misuse that freedom?
And freedom of speech can cut both ways as Daniel Payne points out in the November 25, 2019, Wall Street Journal opinion piece “There’s No Safe Space for Ideas on Campus ‘Animal Farms’: Zealous student activists find ways to punish those who make them think uncomfortable thoughts”:
Most Americans know that higher education has for several decades been in the grip of a deeply intolerant, fanatical and uncompromising strain of progressive activism. Students and sometimes even faculty members regularly chase heterodox speakers off campus, demand complete fealty from terrified campus bureaucracies, and denounce and destroy each other over the slightest and most inconsequential ideological deviations. The environment isn’t unlike George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” a place where “no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”
Yet an even more intolerant brand of campus activism is taking shape. This rising political philosophy isn’t merely allergic to dissenting ideas but is opposed even to ideas about dissenting ideas. It’s a bit like the concept of metacognition in reverse: These activists, gripped by zealotry and inflexible dogmatism, are taking pains to avoid even thinking about thoughts with which they disagree.
Consider a recent controversy at Washington College in Maryland. Students there successfully lobbied to shut down a campus production of a play just one day before it was set to open.
The aggrieved students were upset that the play, Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner,” depicts the evil antics of the Ku Klux Klan. But the play doesn’t show Klan members in a sympathetic light—on the contrary, they’re the villains of the piece, and they get their comeuppance in the end. Yet students were deeply upset by the Klan costumes the actors would wear, so the play had to go. (The theater department was “unable to find a satisfactory compromise” with the student activists, a campus official dryly noted.)
The example of shutting down such a play on a college campus is particularly upsetting to me. I believe live theater can be a very powerful way for people to understand the dangerous consequences of hate. And this is why Susan Chodakiewitz and I have co-founded the THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE project — “Educating Through Theater of the Dangerous Consequences of Anti-Semitism and Racism.”
While we enjoy our Thanksgiving dinners (and football games if you’re a football fan), we also need to spend time reflecting on the democratic rights we have in the U.S. — and what we can individually do to ensure that these rights remain.