Boo Hoo Hoo: Musings on Trauma and Free Speech

Ah, traumas and free speech. The one never seems to come up anymore without the other in modern Boo Hoo Hoo America anymore. Apparently many don’t grasp that free speech is different from action, I can say, for example, and traumatise many in the process by doing so, that god gave this land—Judea and Samaria, the land from not so shining sea to not so shining river—to me and mine. However, if I start to go out and engage in violence to make it so (shout out to Jean-Luc) extralegally—war doesn’t fall into that category oddly since most humans seem to have coded it as legalised murder if selectively—well there are laws as they say.

As to feelings the putative feelings of the traumatised they are, as the song says, nothing more than feelings. And many of those who have them faiil to have to provide evidence of physical violence to back up your traumas, something everyone has for a variety of reasons. Some of us apparently are able to kind of deal with those traumas—traumas we all feel and can hence sympathise and empathise with if some of us only selectively due to parochial political and ideological correctness--whether they be jealousies or some other form of human stupidity--something it is impossible to stop as history shows--thanks to Freud and his children and other coping mechanisms such as Buddhism or the serenity prayer or whatever. We have to if we want to continue slogging our way through the crap and pain that often is life. Life is not and never can be flower child bliss even with the assistance of psychedelics.

In reality, of course, in a world of rationality rather than emotions, calling for death to anyone whether it is theocratic Zionist Jews calling for the cleansing of Palestinians from Judea and Samaria, Palestinians calling for the cleansing Israelis from Palestine, or the formulaic "I am going to kill you” one hears all the time on American winkly TV shows, is speech and, in the case of the TV cop shows, is also usually a McGuffin or a red herring (hmm, interesting) form of speech. It is not an act of physical bodily harm or the killing of someone and thus is not a crime save in the boo hoo hoo fantasies of some of those many humans doped up on certain versions or variations of political and ideological correctness. That so many, including students at supposedly elite retaiversities like Columbia and Michigan and overrated retailversities like USC, have not comprehended this obvious distinction. is not surprising. Moreover, many claiming to be traumatised and thus in need of free speech are lying for their lord and using it as leverage in order to gain power and control in a culture war that has been going on in the United States even before there was a United States. These polemicists, regardless of the reasons for why they are pushing for the criminalisation of some speech, seem not to have grasped the historical fact that it wasn’t even possible to criminalise speech in places like Saudi Arabia, apartheid era South Africa, the old USSR, Israel, or the USofA (shades of prohibition) in the long run even in periods of inquisition and executions, and it will not be possible to do so, in the long run, in America's retaiversites even with their very limited commitments to freedom of speech and academic freedom either. And we should not forget that even if it were somehow possible to criminalise selective forms of speech such criminalisation would necessitate that the state or private corporations build a lot more gaols/jails than the US has now in order to warehouse these linguistic heretics since they would be filled to the gills with language convicts given that humans are first rate at one thing, uttering emotional and fantastical nonsense.

Before I end this post I should take note of the commitment, or better lack of commitment, of those supposedly traumatised by free speech to free speech, you know that little thing that is guaranteed in the US Constitution. Hypocrisy on a general scale about this is not surprising. Just look around at those right wingers who proclaim free speech out of the gilded side of their gobs and violate it out of the others when it is not their politically and ideologically correct speech at every turn.

An addendum. Now we know, thanks to news coverage, who the real purveyors of physical violence and bullying are during the recent protests, those who oppose the free speech of those on American campuses whose free speech they don’t like. Now that is the real America, the America which talks the talk on freedom of speech but doesn’t walk the walk on freedom of speech. By the way, I hear similar minded people are not only attacking Palestinians in the West Bank but food convoys heading to Gaza to relieve hunger as well. Meanwhile some US officially condemns the breaking up of protests by authorities in the nation of Georgia while other American officials urge the need to send in the flics to break up protests at home. Doesn’t all this make you so proud of the human species?