Free people often forget how valuable freedom is until it is taken away from them.
Free speech
Freedom of speech and freedom of belief should be sacrosanct. People should be free to express their political opinions – no matter what they are – provided only that they do not indulge in hate speech or incite others to violence.
Charlie Kirk came unarmed with his family to address a crowd and express his beliefs. He may have been under-educated and indoctrinated. He may have been bigoted. His beliefs may have been archaic and immoral, and based on a work of fiction. But he had a right to hold those beliefs and to express them. Should his beliefs really have carried a death sentence?
Wearing a solemn face
Now let us consider the subject of this article – the reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death.
In the past, when someone died we wore a solemn face and observed decorum in the face of death. When Saddam died, when Osama bin Laden was killed, there was jubilation in the streets. But we did not show our teeth. We allowed others to mourn and to come to terms with what had happened.
Now, however, our mindset is “to hell with them”. We mock those whose opinions we dislike as being insignificant, as being “deplorables”. We abandon all decorum and mock the dead.
Abandoning debate
Charlie Kirk’s speeches helped to create a political shift to the right. He may even have set freedom in the US back by years, perhaps even by decades. This can only be seen as our failure because we abandoned the public square and allowed it to be captured by the enemy. We allowed extremism and bigotry to flourish by refusing to debate with Charlie Kirk and others of his kind. Above all, we let cyberspace become a free for all in which youngsters were indoctrinated.
Little wonder that people are flocking to the evangelical and conservative camps for – shamefully – that is where decorum and coherence are now to be found.
Making a stand
When Galileo and Socrates, Hypatia and Copernicus, aired their views they were often lone voices. When Darwin made his great discovery, he made it public. And in the modern world dissidents living under dictatorship follow their conscience and speak out despite the risk. And many, of course, have paid the price.
So why have we abandoned the debate even though we have a whole section of society on our side? The answer is that we have become too lazy, too casual and too irrational to stand our ground and face our opponent’s barrage without flinching. Long gone, it seems, is the golden age of debate, the days of Christopher Hitchens and his “Four Horsemen” colleagues.
What now remains? Will snipers kill anyone they disagree with, be they “blasphemers”, Evolutionists, pro-choice advocates or rainbow marchers? And when such murders take place will we be appalled if our opponents mock the dead?
Because apparently we are now no better!
By Mubarak Bala
Writing from Rome