There are many aspects to the First Amendment. It's not as simple as the right to free speech. How do we differentiate what should be protected and what crosses the line.
After reviewing the eight values of freedom I felt number seven was the most important to me.
Promote innovation says a society where free speech is valued is better because citizens will be more creative, energized, and interesting.
In todays world, we can tell free speech is not valued and is actually being taken away little by little. Peaceful protests turn into riots, speeches can turn into the speaker getting attacked and hurt. This is not a world where you can speak your mind and not get in trouble.
Freedom of speech has even been taken away by presidents. Recently, former President Donald Trump was arrested for conspiring against the 2020 election. He was arrested for talking about how he didn't agree with the results. That is a violation of his first amendment right and therefore was wrong on the governments part.
He was also told to be silent on twitter and any social media which is a perfect example of prior restraint. That is not ok.
During the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, there were protests and riots almost every day. It was good when the police broke up the riots before anything bad happened however when the peaceful protests got shut down violently from the police, that was another violation of the first amendment.
That's why protesters would get even more fed up. They are trying to bring awareness to this pressing issue and get literally shot down for it.
Doing that is not going to make them stop it's only going to prove their point and make them protest harder.
That's why the protests went on for so long. No one was listening they just wanted to find ways to shut the protests down quickly enough so they wouldn't get rowdy.
Promote innovation comes in handy with this. If police never stopped the peaceful protests and didn't try to overtake the crowds, I think the movement would have made a bigger impact and wouldn't have been so aggressive.
I feel that in todays society everyone is so on top of the current political news and are quick to jump on someone for something they say. Every time there is a statement from Biden or any president, people on the other side (in this example republicans) will immediately start bashing him and saying he's a bad president. Whether or not what Biden said was good or bad it doesn't matter because those people are going to attack him either way.
If our society wasn't so focused on politics and criticizing each other so much, we could accomplish so many cool things.
My big thing is journalists. Imagine if journalists weren't so caught up in politics and trying to say the right things so people will be in agreement with them.
Journalists have lost their right to freely publish what they want. The government plays the biggest role in controlling what can be put in the media and what things are off limits.
That's not what journalism is supposed to be.
Journalists are supposed to expose the truth about the government not be on their side hiding their secrets. It's scary how if you say something that you're not supposed to know, you can easily be thrown in jail.
A perfect example is what happened to
Jim Taricani. He was sentenced to house arrest for 6 months because he refused to name the source who gave him an FBI video of a city official agent taking a bribe.
If journalists could tell the truth and not be punished for it, I think the whole industry would be completely different. Maybe they wouldn't spend so much time writing about politics and would write about new, interesting things.
There is so much up and coming technology, artists, writers, musicians that we could be hearing about but instead it's all about politics.
Promote innovation is the direction I think we as a society should take. I think about how much more exciting the news would be and hearing about so many different, exciting stories would be the thing that lifts people out of a slump.
We need to value the first amendment so we as a society can put our energy into more interesting, innovative things.
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