FROM THE EDITOR: On Freedom of Speech, I Was Wrong
We won't find the reason for poor behavior in Spotsylvania in any one person's motivation, we'll find the reason within ourselves.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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There are few subjects over which I’ve spilt more ink in my career than freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and those who would deny them.
An underlying theme in those columns is a basic question — What is the motivation for denying the rights that were deemed so vital to the new Republic, that the Founding Fathers set it atop the Bill of Rights?
To answer that question, I’ve probed individual motivations. My approach, I now believe, was wrong.
I’ve not erred in recognizing and calling to public attention those who would limit — indeed, end — freedom of speech and freedom of the press. There are far too many. And it is happening far too often.
For some, the reasons are well-intended but ultimately misguided — as when schools ban Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn over the language used in the book, or when schools are concerned about the appropriate age to expose children to difficult topics like sex and violence ban Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
For others, the reasons are more insidious. For example, the idea that the best and brightest of our college-aged students who earned admission to the United States Naval Academy need protection from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, or Ibrahim X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-racist, or Theresa Runstedtler’s Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line, by banning these books and 378 others.
This action represents a level of fear and willful ignorance that transcends any one individual’s ignorance.
That the Naval Academy would bend to the demand and then double-down by canceling Ryan Holiday’s lecture on the virtues of Stoicism — which he has previously delivered the past four years — simply because he would not agree to refrain from discussing the removal of 381 books from the Academy’s library shows how intolerant, and quite frankly, stupid, our public discussion has become.
Conservatives — and even some progressives — have rightly complained for years about the extremes to which people have gone to force “right thought” and “right speech” around issues of gender and race via DEI and other initiatives.
The proper answer to this wrong, however, is not the Trump Administration’s whiplash reaction to create “viewpoint diversity” by curtailing free speech — an act of mindless hypocrisy.
Such hypocrisy, however, is telling and offers a better approach to understanding those who would deny free speech.
Disruption Is the Point
Those who would revoke freedom of speech and freedom of the press are often walking hypocrites.
Evidence of this has not been difficult to find in Spotsylvania County. During the book banning debate, for example, parents who by their self-admission were appalled and shocked at the explicit language in school library books decided to make the case for banning these books, with no sense of irony, by reading aloud the most explicit passages they could find (always out of context) in a room full of school-aged and underaged children during public comments.
At about the same time, the School Board majority addressed their long-standing complaints about their voices being silenced under prior leadership not by showing a better way, but by denying information to Board members they disliked and shutting them down at every turn.
In both cases, the irony escaped the participants. Free speech, they were essentially arguing, demands restricted speech.
This past week, we witnessed this contempt for free speech yet again, as Board members spoke over one another; and filed tactical motion upon tactical motion, thereby weaponizing Robert’s Rules of Order to shut down discussion.
The topic that ignited the problems? What should have been a routine approval of a personnel packet.
The most egregious example of a Board member refusing to listen came at the 2 hour, 47 minute mark in the video when Lisa Phelps began going after a speaker during public comments. The speaker was speaking of her friend’s son who was killed in the recent mass shooting, when Phelps took offense at the speaker addressing her and allegedly coming after her son.
The tension escalated as Board Chair Megan Jackson tried to shut down Phelps’ combative tone by pointing out that speakers that night and others had come after Nicole Cole, Carol Medawar, and Superintendent Clint Mitchell — all three sat and listened as the criticism was delivered.
Phelps refused to be quiet, and Jackson put the meeting into recess.
How does one square claims of defending free speech with such behavior?
The answer, I would posit, lies in understanding disruption.
Chaos Is the Goal
As a public-school teacher, behaviors, I quickly realized, fall into three broad categories:
Distressed - Everyone has days where something has unsettled them. Adults should have the maturity and coping skills necessary to self-regulate their behavior. High school students are still learning to master those skills.
Dysregulated - Unfortunately, there are people who grow up in dysfunctional family environments, and they struggle to control themselves when they are in situations that trigger negative behaviors.
Both these types of individuals present problems that teachers with proper training and support, as well as a healthy dose of experience, can generally manage effectively.
The third type of behavior, however, is of a different variety.
Disrupter - Unlike the distressed student and the dysregulated student, the disrupter exists for the sole purpose of not only acting out to avoid doing their own work but acting out to prevent others from accomplishing their goals as well.
Such individuals are uninterested in embracing the finer arts of coexisting in a society or appreciating the opinions of others. Whatever their individual motivation, they are satisfied only when they have created sufficient chaos to dislodge whatever stability holds the classroom environment together.
This is disruption for the sake of disruption.
In Spotsylvania, disruption has become the point. And it has extended beyond the dais to individuals who are disruptive from the audience, and who use the cameras that televise the meetings as an opportunity to act out and act up.
The Four Freedoms
There are no short-term solutions to the ails that afflict the School Board. Disrupters will disrupt. The only viable long-term solutions rest with voters. Unless, of course, voters are also about disruption and it’s what they want. In that case, don’t expect change anytime soon.
Because the disruption runs as deep as it does, the only real fix will come not from those on the dais, but from all of us.
In his 1943 painting, “The Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech,” Norman Rockwell captured something that people living through truly trying times that require sacrifices from everyone — such as World War II — instinctively understand.
For this generation, freedom of speech wasn’t an abstraction. This generation at that time was sacrificing its sons in a war that in February 1943 was far from decided. The risk of losing it was real. And they understood not just the consequences of losing it, but the reason freedom of speech was so important.
It isn’t about the expression of any one person’s views; it’s about respecting the views of all. Only in so doing can a society adhere.
That is what Rockwell’s painting captures. A common man of low social class, a laborer, rising to address his town’s governmental body. Around him sit people of higher social status, listening intently to the speaker’s ideas.
In Spotsylvania, narcissism now carries the day; disruption has become the norm.
From the Greatest Generation to now, we’ve lost appreciation for the Freedom of Speech. The road back begins with us all, and it won’t come easily.
Updated April 21 at 7:08 to correct the name of the author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
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Brilliant. Thank you.
"Chaos Is the Goal
As a public-school teacher, behaviors, I quickly realized, fall into three broad categories:
Distressed - Everyone has days where something has unsettled them. Adults should have the maturity and coping skills necessary to self-regulate their behavior. High school students are still learning to master those skills.
Dysregulated - Unfortunately, there are people who grow up in dysfunctional family environments, and they struggle to control themselves when they are in situations that trigger negative behaviors.
Both these types of individuals present problems that teachers with proper training and support, as well as a healthy dose of experience, can generally manage effectively.
The third type of behavior, however, is of a different variety.
Disrupter - Unlike the distressed student and the dysregulated student, the disrupter exists for the sole purpose of not only acting out to avoid doing their own work but acting out to prevent others from accomplishing their goals as well.
Such individuals are uninterested in embracing the finer arts of coexisting in a society or appreciating the opinions of others. Whatever their individual motivation, they are satisfied only when they have created sufficient chaos to dislodge whatever stability holds the classroom environment together.
This is disruption for the sake of disruption."
Overall, in agreement. Though I am skittish about the middle section. Where people are cookie cuttered into 3 simplistic categories. I understand doing it to an extent. We all seect to categorize issues and what we perceive as problems.
But such simplistic categorization seems like it's something that came from a seminar. But such simplicity can lead to its own prejudices.
You want to pity someone if they fit into your first two categories, though they themselves are awfully broad - one person can be distressed because they haven't eaten since yesterday, another because the person next to them is gay.
And what exactly is a "dysregulated family"? One with only one parent? One that allows children to watch TV for 2 hours a day instead of 1? Lot of room for interpretation there.
And then the final category. That's the one that worries me the most. In that you so easily assign a cause, which - not incidentally, allows you to then dismiss the one speaking. What proof do you have that if someone does not fit into your first two subjective categories, that they must belong into your third, with all of it's negative connotations which allow you to dismiss their actions?
Are they noble? Rosa Parks was a disruptor. But so were the January 6th insurrectionists.
Doesn't the reason for disruption matter?
I am in agreement that often times those who disrupt are playing to the crowds.
But this is not a new phenomena. Publius Clodius Pulcher was a demagogue long before Huey Long. The only thing new is technology which allows more immediate gratification.
Still, to use that definition as a tool to dismiss the validity or the invalidity of their words or actions is a lazy way of thinking. Rather than trying to determine what subjective category they belong to, wouldn't it be better to ask them why they are disruptive and discuss that?
And only then, acknowledge the point they are trying to make, add it to the others which are being considered, and move on?
Because categorization without thought or information leads to prejudice, which leads to abuse.
Easier, but not necessarily better. I personally thought the Chairperson did very well in calling a recess as a tool for dealing with the heated actions, though it sounds like she could have done better without needing to inject herself into to situation by noting that she handled criticism better.
Anyway, moving on..