IP: SCARED ENOUGH TO HURT OURSELVES

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

SCARED ENOUGH TO HURT OURSELVES
By Jean Otto


First Freedom Op-Ed Service -- an independent project of the American
Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee and the Freedom to Read
Foundation
Board of Trustees.




John Henry Faulk, folklorist and champion of speech whose career
was shredded during the McCarthy era, used to tell a story about
his boyhood in rural Texas.


One hot summer day, Faulk remembered, his mama asked him and his
little friend to gather eggs in the henhouse.  As one of those
barefooted boys reached into a nest a chicken snake trailed behind
his emerging hand.


Johnny and his friend, he remembered, cut a new door in the
chickenhouse.  Breathless and terrified, they ran to mama, who
told them, "Lawsy, Johnny, don't you know a chicken snake can't
hurt you?" "Yes'm," he answered.  "But it can scare you so bad you
hurt yourself."


At the outset of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
told his countrymen that, "We have nothing to fear but fear
itself." It was more than a nice bit of rhetoric.  It was a
prescription for life.  Yet fear remains a driving force for many
of us.  Few of us still fear the Russians, but we are impelled by
what we see all around us to fear for both our lives and our
futures.


We are afraid of crime, of random violence, of books that use
vulgar or sexist or racist words, of people whose skins are a
different color, of people who are poor, of people who are rich.


We fear people driven by ambition, and people with no ambition at
all.   We are afraid of law enforcement that sometimes is out of
control.


We are afraid of a government that often seems to exist for its
own, rather than the people's, best interest, that is so afraid
for itself that it is willing to classify even information that
has appeared in
newspapers, that clears 2 million of its own employees, to keep
information "secret."


We are afraid of declining social values, lack of a reverence for
life, the absence of respect for people who are not just like us,
the power of a religious movement that seems to have little to do
with God and everything to do with controlling people's most
private and personal decisions.


We are afraid of saying anything that will offend somebody.  And
we are afraid of those who are so full of fear that they will
resort to any degree of violence to make the point that they are
not afraid.


We are beginning to ask the impossible question: Which matters
more to us, our safety, or our individual freedoms.  Must we
compromise our rights to assure our safety.  Or must we yield our
safety to assure our rights?




A few weeks ago, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that a few
disgruntled and fear-driven people can blow up a government
building, but they cannot blow up the democracy.  Yet a society
that fears it is tilting toward anarchy can implode from the
effort to save itself.


It may take more courage to protect ourselves from ourselves than
it did to fight World War II.  More than it took to stand up
against McCarthyism and its assault on unnamed enemies.  More even
than it took to establish a nation that assured every citizen
freedom of speech, of the press, and of conscience.


Such courage requires recognizing that words have no power except
the power we give them. Freedom of expression vests each of us in
the rights of citizenship, the right to add our voices to those
around us in debating the issues that impose on our daily lives.


Those voices can inhibit the power of government, can establish
dialogue instead of confrontation, can create civil discourse
instead of violence and mayhem.  Not one of us can be sure of the
right to say what we think unless we allow the same rights to all
the rest of us.


As the Supreme Court has affirmed many times, the answer to speech
we dislike is more speech, not less.  We must give the same
freedom to speech we hate as to that we love.


So how do we defend ourselves against those who publish recipes
for making bombs, or use new forms of technology to subvert the
morality of children.  How do we restrain the excesses of the
media.  How do we insulate the privacy of ordinary citizens who
want to keep their personal lives personal?


The answer is not to allow government to control what is thought
and said and shared.  It is for each of us to decide for ourselves
what we will accept, and establish our own limits.


Self-control, over what we see, hear and read, is the only
acceptable answer for a people who mean to govern themselves.
Self-government is not about laws imposed from the outside but
about standards we impose from within.


If we give up the right to set such standards for ourselves, we
will have given up the most precious liberty of them all, the
right to make our own choices.


If we make those choices out of fear, rather than confidence in
ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and nation, we will have
irreparably hurt ourselves.


Each of us should be, must be, held accountable for our behavior.
But our behavior should be guided by the choices that become
evident through the freedom to read, to discuss, to listen and to
think.  We can reject what we see offered in the marketplace of
ideas if we choose, but we cannot make informed choices if we do
not know what is out there.


We need to concede that words and ideas do not have entitlement,
simply by virtue of their existence, to serious public discussion.
But we cannot reject what we will not see, or hear. Knowledge
increases our safety.


If we cut holes in our Constitution to accommodate our fears, it
will take more than a few boards and some paint to repair what
remains, despite its problems, the repository of every citizen's
hopes.  We need to enrich, not stifle, the dialogue.  To let fear
control our future is to destroy that future.


Jean Otto is the readers' representative for the
Rocky Mountain News and was the editorial page
editor for nearly a decade.  She was a co-founder
of the First Amendment Congress, and has won
numerous First Amendment awards for her work.




This column is distributed by the First Freedom Op-Ed Service, an
independent project of the American Library Association's
Intellectual Freedom Committee and the Freedom to Read Foundation
Board of Trustees.