About Last Night ...

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Are you a supporter of freedom of speech?

Are you a supporter of what happened in Chicago last night?

It is not possible to be both. The two are not compatible.

If you support freedom of speech, you cannot support any efforts to prevent others from exercising their rights to free speech — which is what the protesters in Chicago did last night. They created an unsafe environment and forced controversial Republican front–runner Donald Trump to cancel a planned rally.

If you support what happened in Chicago, you cannot be a supporter of freedom of speech — even if you claim otherwise.

No matter what anyone says on any subject, someone will be offended by it, especially in these polarized times. If I didn't know it before, I certainly learned it when I worked for newspapers in less polarized times.

Freedom of speech exists to protect unpopular speech. It doesn't have to be universally unpopular, either. Clearly, Trump's opinions appeal to some voters and not to others.

But that isn't really so unusual in American politics, is it? I can think of no issue in my lifetime — not a single one — on which there has been universal agreement among the voters. I have often told my journalism students that you won't get unanimous agreement on any proposal in a public opinion poll, even something that you would think would be a slam dunk, like the sky is blue and the grass is green.

Thus, the need for freedom of speech, which protects everyone's right to speak.

That includes the freedom to worship — or not — as you see fit. Both freedom of religion and freedom of speech are protected by the First Amendment.

(The First Amendment also guarantees the people the right to peaceably assemble — I'll get back to that shortly — and freedom of the press.)

Many of the protesters in Chicago were there acting on behalf of others. I have heard today that left–wing activists at Moveon.org were behind it, along with supporters of socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — but last night I heard nothing about who might have been behind it.

I just know that I saw several people who declined to give any reason at all why they were so intent upon preventing a presidential candidate from speaking, and that struck me as highly implausible. I mean, if you're going to go to the trouble of participating in a protest rally, you must have some pretty strong feelings about the subject, right? Why would you decline to give your reasons when you had a somewhat captive audience?

For example, I saw one Hispanic female being interviewed briefly on TV. When she was part of the crowd, she was shouting obscenities. When asked by a reporter what her reasons for participating were, she said she didn't want to give her reasons. Why not?

Do you suppose the reason might have been that they were paid to undermine free speech?

Because that is what they did. They undermined free speech — whether they were paid to do so or not.

Americans are free to agree or disagree with political candidates. They are also free to attend rallies and debates and listen to what the candidates have to say. It's part of the decision–making process.

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Americans are also allowed to peaceably protest, as I mentioned before. The Bill of Rights is rooted in the experiences the Founding Fathers had had as subjects of a foreign power, and they sought to guarantee the freedoms for which many fought and died.

But when protests turn violent, they will soon become riots if not held in check somehow. In Chicago, the candidate reached the conclusion that best way to do that would be to cancel the rally rather than put people in harm's way.

The Americans who came to the rally to listen to what was said, not to shut it down, were denied their rights by what appeared to be mostly 20–somethings who, like many of their generation, have pretty skewed ideas about what freedom of speech means — and whose concept of free speech involves as many loud obscenities as can be wedged into a sentence, not the use of logic.

As I listened to some of the protesters being interviewed, I heard one recurring theme from those who chose to say something other than that they didn't want to talk about their reasons.

That theme was that they were entitled to the benefits of freedom of speech — but not anyone who disagrees with them.

Sorry, folks, that isn't the way it works.

Freedom belongs to all, not a few.

Of Flowers And Water And Bullets

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There certainly were a lot of lingering images from Baltimore last week.

There were, of course, the images of the plundering of small businesses, the burning of public property, the clashes between protestors and police. Those images overwhelmed everything else.

There were also the images of a city government that was caught flat–footed in the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death while in police custody. One had to wonder if this was an isolated incident, or if this sort of thing, albeit on a much smaller scale, goes on all the time. Could the government of Baltimore really be that inept, that incompetent?

And there was the image of the Baltimore mom slapping her son around. I think there must have been a lot of people who applauded that assertion of parental authority. There seems to be far too little of it these days.

I felt some of the most powerful images from Baltimore were the less public moments, the ones that photojournalists always seem to find. Sometimes, unfortunately, those moments have been manufactured, but the spontaneous ones have the power to remain in your memory.

Like the one at the top of this post of the black child distributing bottles of water to city police in riot gear.

It reminded me of a mental image I've carried with me for many years — I say mental because it is entirely the product of my imagination based on accounts I have read and heard. As far as I know, there is no photograph of it. But it is said to have happened 45 years ago — yesterday, I believe, maybe the day before — in Ohio.

To put it in historical perspective, President Nixon had just told the world about the Americans' previously secret invasion of Cambodia. Angry protests had erupted on college campuses all across the country. In Ohio, the National Guard had been called out to bring order to the campus of Kent State University.

Lots of people think that the Guard only appeared in Kent on the day of the shootings — Monday, May 4, 1970 — but the Guard was there that weekend. Sometime that weekend, Allison Krause, who had just turned 19, approached one of the Guardsmen with a flower in her hand. She placed it in the barrel of his weapon and said, "Flowers are better than bullets."

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On Monday, May 4, Krause was one of four Kent State students who died after being shot by Guardsmen. Her comment about flowers and bullets is chiseled into the stone that marks her grave.

It seems to me that those two moments, separated by nearly half a century, summarize the differences in the thinking of the two sides in our ongoing political debates.

Liberals are like the image in my mind of Allison Krause. They see an ideal world that doesn't exist — but, in their minds, it should, and it frustrates them that it does not.

Conservatives are like the young black boy distributing water bottles to combatants. They see the world — and deal with it — as it is. They wish the world was better, but it is not, and it frustrates them that it is not.

I wonder if the two sides will ever find common ground.

Myth America

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I think the origin of the phrase "women's liberation" can be traced back 50 years, maybe more, but it may not have been widely used until this day in 1968 (I was a child in 1968 so there are certain to be things of which I knew little and understood even less).

Forty–five years ago today, hundreds of women staged a protest in Atlantic City, N.J., home of the annual Miss America Pageant. They were protesting what they saw as the meat market atmosphere of the pageant.

And women's liberation joined all the other groups of that day that demanded to be treated better than they had been treated up to that time. As I say, I was just a child, but the logic of the argument did not escape me. My parents had always taught my brother and me that a principle upon which this nation was founded was simply this — all citizens should be treated the same.

Now, at a time when there were protests for and against just about everything by just about everyone, it was necessary to stand out in some way. As much as it was anything else, the '60s was a very theatrical decade, and you had to be entertaining to gain attention. The protest at the Miss America Pageant found its dramatic hook — so to speak.

Into a barrel labeled "Freedom Trash Can," the protesters dumped such symbols of domestic oppression as makeup, pots, mops, high heels, girdles, false eyelashes — and bras, lots and lots of bras.

But, contrary to what rapidly became urban legend, the trash can's contents were not set ablaze.

(I will admit that, as a writer, I appreciate the dramatic side of that tall tale. But that doesn't change the fact that it simply is not true.)

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That was what mainstream America thought, however, and "bra burning" became synonymous with the women's liberation movement.

I heard the phrase, but I had little idea what it meant. I only knew that the idea seemed alien and, in some ways, frightening to the adults in my world. Actually, fire was a frightening thing for me as well. It was frightening for anyone who had seen uncontrolled fire — and you could see it on the news every night — although I have to admit that I didn't fully understand things from the adults' point of view. Now that I am an adult myself, I think I can understand the confusion my parents, my grandparents and their peers felt.

They had seen the war protesters burning their draft cards so the idea had some legitimacy. They had just witnessed riots in the streets at the Democrats' national convention in Chicago; a few months earlier, they had seen race riots in nearly every major American city following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

It was a confusing, frightening time in America. Traditional roles — gender, racial, you name it — were under assault. Those roles may have been — well, they were — based on unfair stereotypes, but they gave most Americans a guide for who they were and what their role in the culture was.

I don't have a vivid memory of the things my elders said, but my impression was that they were fearful of the violence, the aggression — and, also, probably, the threat posed to that social yardstick — that was implied by the idea of women burning their bras in protest. It was almost as if women were seen as the last friendly, traditionally nurturing demographic group in America. If the idea of their violent revolt was true, no hope was left.

And that is all it was, really — an idea, an idealized image, not a fact.

As I say, there were other items that were trashed during the protest, but nothing was burned. No fires were started.

In fact, according to the story I heard, that whole rumor started when a reporter who was covering the protest compared (I presume in conversation with other reporters) the women protesters to Vietnam War protesters burning their draft cards.

And a myth was born.

Nevertheless, I can remember hearing my mother, my grandmothers and the other women of their generations speak disapprovingly of what they thought was going on in Atlantic City.

After the fact, I wondered if, secretly, my grandmothers and the women of their generation weren't a bit envious of those younger women who were asserting themselves so publicly, perhaps expressing what my grandmothers and their friends had long believed but had never had the nerve to say.

My grandmothers were young when American women won the right to vote, and they may have thought that was as much liberation as they could expect in their lifetimes. Then, as they were approaching the end of their lives, the younger generation was doing things my grandmothers never would have dreamed of doing.

The times really were a–changing.

Herman Cain to Unemployed: Drop Dead

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"Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself."

Herman Cain

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OK, Herman Cain never told the nation's 14 million unemployed or underemployed Americans to drop dead.

Neither, for that matter, did President Ford tell New York City to drop dead — as a famous headline in the New York Daily News proclaimed during Ford's brief White House tenure.

But Ford might as well have told New York to drop dead, and the same applies to Cain and like–minded Republicans in 2011.

Ford was a Republican, and he was taking a stand against a federal bailout of a city that was struggling. I suppose modern Republicans — openly applauding, as they have recently, the refusal of medical care to someone because that person is not insured — would hail Ford as a visionary.

I have a feeling Cain would have liked the stand against bailouts — except, of course, for those cases in which he would be in favor of them. With today's Republicans — hell, with politicians in general — it's hard to say.

It all really depends, as an acquaintance of mine used to say, on whose ox is being gored.

Cain, of course, was defending New York — or, at least, Wall Street — against the angry protests from citizens who are understandably irked that the financiers have profited from their selfish practices that caused so much pain for many millions of Americans who, as a result of others' creative accounting practices, lost their jobs.

Whose fault was that, Mr. Cain?

Now, I'll be the first to admit that there are always a couple of bad apples in any given barrel. But, as a song from my youth reminded listeners in those days, "One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch." Prejudice is prejudice, whether it is based on race or religion or age or gender — or financial status.

The Great Recession has deprived America of the efforts of many creative, talented people, and it is simply wrong for anyone who knows nothing about individual circumstances to make a blanket assertion that the unemployed are to blame for not having a job.

The vast majority of the unemployed are not to blame for their plight, and it is to Cain's everlasting shame that he does blame them.

What's next? Will he blame the sick and the handicapped for their conditions? Will he blame the elderly for coming down with maladies that typically afflict older people?

America was once a country that offered a helping hand to those who were struggling, but, somehow, America has gone from being a place that sought to judge people on the content of their characters to a place that judges people on the content of their bank accounts. Well, most politicians do, regardless of party.

All the politicians, from the Oval Office on down, want money, lots of it. If they speak of encouraging job creation, it is mostly lip service, intended to gain votes but said in a kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink sort of way to the money boys. We won't really hold you accountable, it implies.

No, they can't risk offending the money boys — or, for that matter those who have grown comfortable in their rapidly dwindling middle–class lifestyles and for whom the thought of being unemployed is like indigestion or the sight of a homeless person panhandling at an intersection — temporarily unpleasant, but, once gone from one's thoughts, it is forgotten, replaced by musings about this weekend's cookout or the impending release of the latest electronic gadget — and those who can afford it (and even some who cannot) will still contribute money to candidates who promise them they can keep what little they still have.

Money is power. Money is clout. Money buys advertising time. The unemployed can't afford to contribute much to political campaigns — their money is tied up in staying alive. But the financiers, the bankers, the Wall Streeters do have money, lots of it, and politicians in both parties shamelessly pursue it.

It's not your fault, Cain and others like him soothingly tell Wall Street. It's those greedy unemployed people. If they had any gumption, they'd go out and get a job or start their own business and make a fortune like Steve Jobs.

I share the rage that many people feel toward Wall Street, but I try to be rational about it. As I have observed so many times, things are rarely black and white. Most of the time, they are distinguished by subtle shades of gray.

I rather liked what Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic: "There are honest and dishonest people on Wall Street, sensible and absurd people in the Occupy Wall Street, accurate and inaccurate critiques of American finance."

It is counter–productive to obsess about blame as we have a tendency to do in our culture these days. After all, Democrats promised to close Guantanamo and bring the troops home. I have Democrat friends who insist that these steps, along with taxing the rich, will put the economy back on track.

And I have Republican friends who blame excessive regulation and Obamacare for restricting job creation.

And neither side will concede that the other might have a good point or two.

We also have a tendency to rush to judgment. When Bush was president, critics were dismissed as unpatriotic. During Obama's presidency, critics have been dismissed as racist. Neither side cared about legitimate concerns that were raised. That's no way to build a consensus.

It's been easier for both sides to adopt a take–no–prisoners–all–or–nothing approach to governing — to rely on shaming the other side.

Well, the shame is on the politicians. And a good place to start is with Herman Cain.