Sticks & Stones
My webmaster, Ou81aswell, posted this timely reminder of a Lord of the Flies tail-end boomer childhood on Sooey's yesterday:
Whatever happened to the old adage "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me."?
He's referring to the free speech debate here and about because he's a huge fan of Michael Coren and all the free speechers were featured on his show last night to discuss the demerits of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Anyway, I hated to do it, because it's a cheap shot (and it IS a cheap shot on the Internet, 100% of the time - if I was one of the elves living in the Internet, I'd scramble it to "cheap shot" every time) - but I responded "The Holocaust". (Although, in between, fenderbender posted, "Someone got blindsided with a dictionary." to really take away from the pithy gravitas of MY post. I hate it when that happens. I would have switched our posts, but unfortunately, I'm a total techno'tard.)
But it was reflexive, posting "The Holocaust". Because I suspect that's what free speechers are really up against when they try to make their debate in the context of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. It strikes me that the CHRC was created because of what people at the time saw as a need, on moral grounds, to deal in a governmental capacity with the kind of speech that had been determined to have led to The Holocaust. With the result that it was set up almost with a retroactive preventative mandate, if that makes any sense at all.
And it doesn't, of course. But it also doesn't make any sense to recite childhood rhymes as some kind of ode to free speech, either. Words do hurt and people are damaged by the words of others. Lives are ruined, jobs lost, opportunities denied, relationships ended, hope destroyed, and then, of course, there's The Holocaust. Words matter.
But how much do words posted anonymously on Internet websites that are already recognized as hate speech matter - in 2008 - in a multicultural society with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and bully awareness programs in all its public schools and same sex marriages next door and pay equity studies at work and abortion rights action groups on the march and so on and so forth right up and back down the line so that when bigoted behaviour is brought to light, the duly elected MP guilty of it is forced to apologize and wear it like a cream pie?
Because that's where we're at now. And the fact that the free speech vs CHRC debate has become so tawdry should be proof enough that we don't need to have it.
