You can say anything ... once

 

Make Buns, not Guns

If we're going to talk about free speech and political correctness (as Jordan Peterson loves to do to the applause of reactionary audiences), we ought to begin by examining our terms. I begin this post by maintaining that there really is no such thing as free speech, and neither is there anything definitive[1] about political correctness. Both are what could be called memes[2], and memes can be catch phrases that pretend to be real "things" and are most useful in an age of social media to rally support among people who are less interested in factuality than in ideological short answers to problems.

               Allow me an example around book burning and censorship. I maintain that all of us are in favour of censorship; that each of us has a threshold beyond which written text has no business being tolerated. Our thresholds simply rise and fall at different places and over time, depending on a variety of factors. Do I believe that a children's book depicting sexual violence ought to be burned? Where do I stand on whether to take Huckleberry Finn off the school curriculum because of racist language? Should a high school teacher be sanctioned for making Hitler's Mein Kampf required reading for his History class?

               Everybody supports censorship, so saying "I oppose censorship" is a false statement unless followed by qualifications indicating where one's thresholds lie.

               The same principle applies to free speech and political correctness. Speech that is "free" includes only speech that falls under one's threshold where utterances are deemed acceptable/unacceptable. Children's mouths are washed out with soap if they swear; adults are taken to court and punished if they publicly defame another person, lying in a court trial is called perjury and is a crime for which the perjurer is punished. Speech is not and has never been free in its absolute sense, although the parameters in which speech is not punishable has an aura of freeness. 

              In practice, certain speech is treated like assault and falls outside commonly accepted parameters of free speech. Here again, to blanket-defend free speech is to imply that speech is either free or it's not free; arguing for a polarity which doesn't exist in fact.

               And I haven't even mentioned the promulgation of false information that's become an issue of no small significance in this internet age.

               I have at times supported the argument that distasteful or dissenting speech be allowed a platform, particularly on university campuses. My reasoning for that has been based on a principle that the expression of that which is objectionable, counter-cultural condemns itself in the act. There are problems with that approach, of course, one being that unless an argument in opposition to the unpopular viewpoint is being made in parallel, we risk the gullible being seduced by false or questionable information.       

               Most legitimate advocacy for free speech is about the expression of political opinions contrary to those held by a majority. In effect, the concern is that we're pushing to have non-mainstream statements made punishable. I would say most citizens of Canada are in favour of considering unpopular opinions unpunishable, a right under the Constitution. We are even tolerant of much speech at the margins: "Mayor Smith is a jackass," said at coffee row does not generally result in litigation. It's more likely that if Mayor Smith gets wind of Jake Jones going about saying stuff that impinges on his reputation, that he would simply reply with, "It takes one to know one," and get on with his day.

Considerable free speech advocacy tends to apply the constitutional right to much more than the expression of alternative political opinion. The key to determining what speech can be freed and what speech cannot lies in the effect on the hearer(s). To use speech to ruin a reputation is not substantially different from using matches to burn someone's house down.

         We've all become conscious, I think, of movements that through publicity, sanctions, and/or what's being called cancel culture, have been decrying, even shaming members of the public for uttering certain kinds of speech and writing. Referring back to free speech, this phenomenon could be seen as pressure to move certain speech and writing from the acceptable to the unacceptable corral, or vice versa. 

           You mustn't refer to black people using the "n" word, or to indigenous women as "squ..s." It's called political correctness, and if by politics, we mean the total of arrangements a people have agreed to in order to live together in harmony and peace, then political correctness is probably the right expression. There are ways of addressing people, speaking about people that can prevent or disrupt harmony, and those asserting that this "correctness" goes too far have their own unique criteria for what should be included in correct speech, and what should not.

The argument goes thus: persons are having their freedom of speech curtailed by an expanding political correctness sensibility well beyond what's necessary to maintain harmony. Here again, what is politically correct and what is not isn't a yes/no matter. To say that one is being criticized simply for reasons of political correctness is disingenuous. If I declare I can say unpopular things as my right, then it follows that others have the right to declare what I said bullshit, defending that utterance with the same argument. 

      That old adage, "You can say anything … once," has merit in that it's not a legal question so much as the fact that majorities elect governments (theoretically) and they also have power to counter unpopular utterances … in ugly ways sometimes. It's how human cultures have always worked and if you wish to champion an unpopular cause, it's advisable to weigh the cost, accept the consequence.

On the other side, I'm reminded of Galileo who scientifically determined that the earth was not the centre of the universe … and said so. He was brought up before a church tribunal and ordered to recant on peril of his excommunication. He did. But only in words. Legend has it that as he exited the event he muttered, "… and yet it (the earth) moves!" We need mavericks who steer us out of ignorance into knowledge and ought to thank people like Galileo and Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther who weighed the consequences that conservative stubbornness and resistance to change would bring down on their heads, and went ahead with an unpopular mission. What we don't need are mavericks who drive us back from knowledge into a jungle of misinformation in order to sabotage progress.

               In the North American culture as we find it today, public conversation is poisoned by those who weaponize memes like political correctness, freedom of speech, leftist/rightest, censorship, etc., to the point where citizens are herded into adversarial camps stamped with labels they assume to be definitive.  An anatomical analysis of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol should open our eyes to the power hidden in this strategy. Interviews with participants produced no deep philosophical discussions, but rather a recitation of memes deliberately planted in the soil of America by Donald Trump and those riding on his coattails.

               We don't want to witness a repeat of the post-World War I struggle between communists, fascists  and democrats in Germany.  "Almost from the start, the Weimar Republic came under attack from within. Right-wing extremists, meanwhile, used their political power to oppose any democratic system, and to blame the country's WWI defeat on a conspiracy between socialists and Jews. Although the moderate government-maintained power, violence erupted on the streets between the left and right. It was a rough start for this democracy." [3] Relative memes of the time included, "Juden 'Raus," (Jews get out), "Sieg Heil" (Hail to Victory), "Vaterland" (fatherland) and "Lebensraum," (living space, i.e., creating space for the Fatherland by reclaiming land once occupied by Germany and conquering new territory). The denouement of this internal super-partisanship included, of course, WWII, the Holocaust, the deaths of millions in the conflicts and the massive destruction of European infrastructure.

               "It can't happen here" is a childish, foolish sentiment.[4] The NAZI movement started small but gathered steam as the chaos and hardship of the country persisted under massive resentment, hyperinflation, decimation of the middle class, increasing poverty and finally, the Great Depression of 1929. Hard times nourish the desire for a messiah with an ideology: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and so many other ordinary persons gifted with rhetorical skill and a basket of catch phrases, hate memes, and the support of those who hope to achieve greatness on their coattails.

Perhaps the questions about free speech, political correctness and related subjects are answered best by John Pavlovitz in If God is Love, Don't be a jerk, p. 48:

"In this life, you've surely hurt other people and you've done so in one of two ways: either you've accidentally injured someone by saying or doing something that you weren't aware was offensive or painful to them or you've intentionally wounded them because that was either partially or fully what you were trying to do from the beginning. In the former case you were human and in the latter case you were a jerk—and oftentimes you're the only one who knows the truth [of motives behind your actions]."

Or perhaps it's all summarized by the essential humanness that's common to all members of the species, namely their capacities for love of the other versus love of self. One path leads to cooperation and compassion, the other to conquest and power, power that can only come from forms of subjugation.

               Were we all human in Pavlovitz's statement and not bent toward being jerks, free speech and political correctness wouldn't have any currency because following in Christ's footsteps, our faith in the efficacy of love would guide our words and our actions. Like Lion parents teach their children to hunt as their primary task in life, we must see our duty as adult humans to raise our children to be human and not jerks.

 

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[1] Definitive, meaning that a word matches precisely that to which it refers.

[2] Merriam Webster: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from one person to another in a culture.

[3] For a dramatic, fictionalized portrayal of the descent into chaos during the Weimar Republic, I recommend the Netflix series Babylon Berlin.

[4] It Can't Happen Here is a dystopian novel written in 1935 by Sinclair Lewis. I reviewed this novel in 2017 on http//:readwit.blogspot.com and the book is available from multiple sources online. Seen by many as prophetic of the rise of Donald Trump, it was conceived in the Weimar era, in the midst of the Great Depression.

 

Fifty Ways to Lose your Children©

George G. Epp

No one could bring himself to go home until a water-colour sunset dimmed to candle-light in the west and the pall of night descended on bush and pasture and the steep and scrubby banks of the South Saskatchewan. A few had brought flashlights and as they’d all regrouped in answer to the search leader’s whistle, four of us volunteered to continue into the night by the faltering and inadequate light we’d brought with us. I was one of the latter. The rest were advised to head back to their cars and home while there was still dusk enough to find their ways.

               So team-leader Aaron Barstow, Edie Clausen, Donavon Epp and I, Danny Schmidt were left to huddle once more to plot our “strategy;” Aaron had used that word a lot since the Mounties had put together groups for the search and Aaron had volunteered to lead ours. Donavon clicked the switch on his flashlight a few times, banged it against his thigh and shined it upward at his face when it flickered on. I remember he looked demonic lighted that way.

               “Save your batteries,” Aaron said. Donavon switched off his light, stepped closer into the circle.

               “Don’t think my batteries have a lotta life left,” he said.

               “No,” Aaron said. “We’ll only have an hour or two at best.”

               The futility of it struck me. I recalled being up in LaRonge on a visit some dozen or so years ago and signing up for an aerial search. A plane had apparently gone down somewhere between Prince Albert and The Pas and search command had assigned Nipawin Air to search an area about the size of a postage stamp on the wall map, a full hour east of LaRonge. I and two local men volunteered to act as spotters and we crawled into an ancient 4-seater Beaver on skis and headed out. How our pilot found the assigned area was beyond me, but we flew and flew due east, then west, then east again, our eyes watering with the cold and intense peering down into a vast, undifferentiated forest broken up only by lakes and rivers. We’d been told to look for anything that didn’t fit: the glint of light off metal, a slash through the trees, smoke that might indicate a signal fire. Anything.

               Needle in a haystack; contact lens lost in a meadow.

               “I don’t see any point in stumbling around on the steep part of the riverbank in the dark,” Aaron was saying. “There’s an open field of stubble between this bush and the road, and beyond that, a pasture with a few heifers. We’ll search those looking for, I guess . . . any signs that she walked across there: Kleenex, a footprint, anything.”

               That’s what we did for an hour, walking four abreast with five feet between us. We walked the margin of a harvested wheat field, then the pasture where a half dozen heifers followed us and days of cattle-making-tracks would probably mean that footprints would be indistinguishable, even in daylight. I shone my flashlight in short arcs in front of me with one hand and turned up my collar, zipped my jacket up to my chin with the other. Last night had been the first autumn frost; tonight would—the forecast said—be even chillier.

               As kids, we’d lose things … a lot. I remember the typical conversations:

Me, “But I’ve looked everywhere!”

Mom, “No you haven’t. There’s one place you haven’t looked and that’s where your pencil case is right now.”

Her name is, or was, Tiffany Sadowsky. She’s eleven, is tall for her age at 5’2” with long brown hair. She was wearing a Pioneers club jacket—blue—and jeans. There were eight kids and two adult leaders on the canoe trip that started in Saskatoon and camped at Fish Creek, where it was discovered in the morning that her sleeping bag was empty and Tiffany wasn’t answering when they called. Unfortunately, they’d chosen a cell-phone dead-spot to camp, and by the time the two leaders had rowed downstream far enough to be in cell phone range, a full hour had passed, plus another until the RCMP were able to get to them. Ordered to stay where they were, the young canoeists had yelled themselves hoarse during the wait, had defied orders by making fruitless, short forays into the bush.

All that was three days ago. The StarPhoenix had ferreted out as many details as they could; the photospread of her family made me feel ill, as if the paper would send a card to Tiffany’s mother thanking her for the boost in circulation the loss of Tiffany had created for them. They were a sober-looking family: a single mom, blond and heavily made up for the photographer, an adolescent boy with long, dark hair and a very thin six- or seven-year-old girl with the same long, brown hair of her sister. And then there was Tiffany, sitting on the edge of the couch with her arm around her mother’s shoulders and a grin that was at once mischievous and . . . well, happy.

The facts were few, and so the speculations were many. Coffee row in Rosthern eliminated the rapture, remained equivocal on drowning and third-party involvement in that order. We were content, it seemed, to simply assume that that Sadowsky girl had just disappeared for reasons unknown. Calloused emotions, blasé responses. I kept thinking about “there’s one place you haven’t looked, and that’s where she is.” Do the Mounties know this?

No material thing, no person, no remains of a person can exist without a place. My pencil case was in my school bag where I knew it wouldn’t be, so I hadn’t looked there.

It was 10:30 when we decided to make the walk back to Fisher Road before our flashlights gave out completely. Sadie was sitting up in bed reading when I went upstairs and she needed to know what the day had been like. But there were no tellable details. We walked, we looked, we found nothing.

I checked in on Jamey and Russell who should have been asleep but were building a Lego fort.

Jamie looked up. “Did you find the girl?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid we didn’t. Maybe tomorrow.”

He turned and turned Lego blocks between thumbs and fingers of both hands, got up, sat down on his bed. “Maybe she’s in heaven.”

“Or maybe she’ll be found safe and sound in some warm place. You guys need to go to sleep. School tomorrow.” Jamey is nearly eleven, Russell nine and already showing early symptoms of the second child syndrome: contrary and acquiescent by turns, unnecessarily competitive with Jamey and the odd hint of pleasure in torturing the cat. Russell climbed up to his bunk after three or four urgings and I made to tuck him in, but didn’t.

“I don’t feel sleepy,” Jamey said and I knew what he really meant, that a lost girl out in the cold and dark must be found before the world sleeps.

I lay awake for a long time myself.

I’m a dreamer. My dreams extend the worries of the day into rabbit holes and down dark alleyways. Sometime that night I woke up, my pajamas wet with sweat. I’d been looking, not for Tiffany with the long, brown hair, but for Russell, and then not Russell but Jamey. I ran down long corridors with door after door, all locked and rounding a corner, I ran into Donavon. His face was the face I’d seen in the semi-darkness of the Fish Creek almost-wilderness, demonic, almost sneering. He laughed. Said nothing. Laughed again and then ducked into a door marked MANAGER. I tried to move, shouting ”Tiffany! Tiffany!” but my feet wouldn’t move. And then I fell. Down into a deep well, somewhere like the farm where as a boy I watched my dad and two neighbours pulling a dead calf out of the well. I woke up when I hit the water.

Sadie turned on the light. “You screamed,” she said and wrapped her arms around my head.

I felt breathless, and the familiarity of the art on the walls, I think, the reassuring sameness of the room and Sadie’s caresses slowly brought my heartbeat back to normal. Or near to it. I told her in chopped sentences about my nightmare; she’d been here before. She knew me better than I knew myself.

“I think I’d die if that was Russell . . . or Jamey lost out there,” I said.

“It’s not Jamey and it’s not Russell,” she said. “And it never will be.” She sounded so sure.

Sadie persuaded me to go to church the following morning. “You can go hunting after lunch,” she said, and I acquiesced . . . reluctantly. During sharing and prayer, Pastor Christy prayed that Tiffany would be found, and for her family that they would be comforted. My soul rebelled, do we not know that Jesus will not plow through the shrubs, the rocks and the stones to find a lost girl?

“I’ve got to go,” I whispered to Sadie. She nodded.

“I’ll go home with the Brookses,” she said.

I drove back, parked the car on a field driveway and walked the short, winding trail down to the old, collapsing Fish Creek Church and on toward the river. The campsite was obvious. Police, searchers, thrill-seekers had trampled the grass there and a circle of grey ash remembered the fire around which the Pioneers had gathered for their dinner. A log had undoubtedly served them as a seat as they watched the sparks soar into darkness. I sat. Maybe at the exact spot where a young girl sat gazing into the fire and then did, or didn’t, go to sleep under the stars.

I closed my eyes and sat, just sat. Nothing to do. We’d looked everywhere. The only voices speaking into my silence were the lap, lap, lapping of the water eddying around a rock and the almost inaudible whisper of poplar leaves twisting in the wind, green-tinged with the muted yellow that heralds the dying of summer. In time I sensed a presence. So close that it might be my mother sitting beside me on the log. And the poplar leaves and the eddies seemed to say, “There is one place where nobody has looked, and that’s where Tiffany is.”

“There’d have to be a million places where no one has looked,” I thought. “What’s more, I’ve no idea what places have been searched and what places have been missed.” By now, the RCMP would be telling Sharlene Sadowsky that missing children not found within twenty-four hours are seldom found alive.

In the gentlest of ways, Sadie had hinted to me that my emotional reaction to the missing child of strangers was . . . well, more than usual. I countered that as a father of two children and a mid-grade teacher, I couldn’t help but see my children and my students’ faces in the lost girl. I even recited the last verse of John Donne’s prophetic poem: “Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: It tolls for thee.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. “You need to accept that you’ve done what you can. You’ll need to let it go. If not sooner, than later.”

It was early afternoon when I finally left the place that by now had become haunted for me. I had known this place long ago; paddling the South Saskatchewan downstream from Saskatoon to the junction with the North branch had been mine and Donovan’s boyhood goal as adventurers. Twice, we’d put in at Gabriel’s Bridge and then hankering for a change, had Donavon’s dad drive us and his canoe to Saskatoon where we put in at the CPR Bridge.

Our first night’s bivouac that time had been at the very spot where the Pioneers had lost their friend, and probably also their innocence. It was also the place where a snuffling black bear scared the hell out of us, where we disembarked so fast that our provisions got left behind and we had to restock at Batoche—on bags of peanuts and a dozen chocolate bars.

 

Classes had just gotten underway the week before and unremarkably, Tiffany’s story faded with the day-to-day of organizing, teaching, coaching, cajoling and encouraging the twenty-three Grade Sevens I’d been assigned. But it all came back when the StarPhoenix and CTV reported cursorily that Tiffany had been found safe and sound, that a custody battle, a stalking and a nighttime kidnapping were involved and charges had been laid.

Safe and sound. Probably a medical check was done and all her organs deemed to be functioning normally and she had no visible contusions, no broken bones, so “safe and sound.” An answer to prayer.

I didn’t think so, and still don’t.

In about the middle of October, Russell was suspended for two weeks for laying a vicious beating on his best friend, Raymond. It had to do with a Tooney one of them had found in the playground at recess. We left his counselling to the school psychologist but removed most of his privileges at home, hoping for some kind of “born again” change in his attitude. Sadie and I were left with the feeling that Russell would grow up like a kite, picking up on and riding the crests of winds over which neither he nor we had control, possibly crashing with an unanticipated lull in the breeze. How would we live with that? Would we be up to it?

And then there was Jamey. So easy, like a puppy on a leash and so happy to be contained in the radius of that restriction. He never loses his pencil box.

Paul Simon is responsible for an ear worm that recurs for me often, that being the catchy tune in “Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover.” When I sing it in my head these days, it goes, “Fifty Ways to Lose your Children.”

I mentioned this to Pastor Christy. She’s very wise. She said, “I guess we can only lose our children if we assume we owned them in the first place.” For me, this was a poignantly powerful answer. Also, for me at that, at this time, it was no answer at all. Maybe it will be some day.

So much in this world depends on whether or not Tiffany has been truly and lovingly found. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.

There’s another parable that was forgotten by Writer/Apostle Luke. In it, the Prodigal Son never returns, is never found.