The right I valued most. Before I knew.

The right to freedom of speech and expression.
The right to free speech is meant to be an absolute right. Meaning that it should have no ifs, ands or buts attached to it. This right exists to ensure that you can say offensive things. The right is not there to protect you from the nice things you say. It’s there to make sure that you can say bad things, and not be punished for it. On paper this right sounds magnificent. A right that allows you to be honest? Excellent. But it doesn’t exist.

Obviously, hate-speech is excluded from the things you are free to say. The use of emotionally charged words which ring up historical grievances is strictly forbidden. This is obviously so in order to prevent people from launching into racist, sexist and otherwise discriminatory tirades. This prevents social chaos, easy to understand.

However, this makes the right to free speech a limited right. This contradicts the very value of this right, which lies in its absoluteness. If the right to free speech is meant to cover you in the instance that you say something super offensive, why is it failing in this purpose?

Due to the limits on our “absolute” right to freedom of speech, we are essentially only allowed to say mildly offensive things.

The beauty of freedom of speech lies in its allowance for discourse. If someone says something that you feel insults the very core of your being, you have as much right to defend yourself, and tell that person that they are an idiot/ bigot/ tool. In this way, social issues, stigmas and conditions can be fleshed out honestly and thoroughly.

If limitations do not allow us to express very personal, very controversial viewpoints, then these stay silent. Essentially, our society seems less homophobic than it used to be. But really, it is only VERBALLY less homophobic. People don’t say words like faggot, not because they don’t mean them or intend to hurt with them, but because they can be tried for hate speech.

This isn’t eradicating things like homophobia. It’s sweeping them under a muting rug. And, to boot, making sure that social issues don’t get air, and thus don’t get solved with debate.

I am grateful for freedom of speech, but I am not grateful for the conditions attached to it.

Toodles Eugene!

The recent murder of Eugene Terre Blanche brought to light racial tensions, previously thought to have been erased. To the naked eye of the common South African, it would seem that no one cast more than a cursory thought in the direction of Terre Blanche for the last decade or so. He fettered away his last days living in a modicum of poverty on his small farm, without doing much to offend anyone. Suddenly, after his murder, it seems that Terre Blanche had not left anyone’s mind for a single second. The level of chaos and racial segregation present at the trial of his accused murderers speaks of old racial tensions that were never quite eased.


As Dennis Beckett explains in his article, “Eugene the arch-ogre”, Terre Blanche was not necessarily a frightening man, but simply a man with frightfully misdirected passions and paranoia. While he partook in a system of racial exclusion and violence, he seemed to do it from a place of honest concern. Whether or not this can be believed is up to personal scrutiny, as Beckett also outlines that Eugene was a phenomenal orator.


With Terre Blanche’s murder, it became evident that white Afrikaners feel threatened by a coming genocide. You can’t really blame them either. With the country’s youth singing energetically along with their leader, Julius Malema, to a song that promotes their genocide, and no one but their own representatives doing anything about it.


It also became apparent that black South Africans feel that Terre Blanche and those similar to him should be murdered, due to their current youth leadership. It is hard to tell at this point whether Julius Malema has become the new Eugene Terre Blanche, and whether he will spark a racial pogrom similar to that of Terre Blanche.

Mneh.

I don't like to pretend that anyone would rather be reading about the boring minutia of my life than doing something important like... I don't know, sitting down. Blogging, in my opinion, is something mothers would love. To read about absolutely everything that little Timmy has done all day and exactly what emotions were evoked by exactly which actions. So, technically, every personal blog should be followed by one person: Your mother. Because only she cares about how delicious a pot of noodles you can make, big boy. Everyone else just thinks you are a tool.

But, next in a long line of personal hypocrisies, I am starting this blog. As a third-year journalism student it is, like, totally necessary that I blog. Radical!

Terri

Bleh.

Meh.