Corners

Turning around a corner can be exciting – one never knows just what may be around the corner they are turning.  While most of us don’t expect to see purple tigers hiding around every corner or golden dragons crouching about at each corner (or was it “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”?), one may encounter an old friend or a new environment around some corner.  Of course, this would be in reference to turning a physical corner in or around some building or structure.  However, society proverbially turns corners as well – sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse.  We seem to be turning a corner in western society, and like a sadomasochistic boa constrictor we are suffocating ourselves to death as we pinch out the life-blood of our own freedoms.  Rather than recognizing our self-applied straight jacket and reversing the process to regain more freedom, we are acting as our own executioners and tightening the straight jacket and the noose about our necks, merely catalyzing our own doom.  This is happening at a break-neck pace in the area of freedom of speech, as we let enlightened bureaucrats dangle the banana-on-a-stick politically correct rhetoric in front of our faces and we chase the ever downward moving target of what is acceptable as free speech.  I have heard of immigrants from other countries, particularly former communistic sovereign states, lowering their voices when speaking of the government, especially in a derogatory fashion, even once they have become a U.S. citizen, because their old habit of guarding themselves since one never knows just who is listening in on a conversation remained.  Is that what we are progressing, or want to progress towards?  I admit, I am slightly perturbed by the answer I may receive.  Our ‘trigger-warning, safe-space’ college campus environments may soon spill over into everyday life, and only self-affirming, or better yet state-affirming rhetoric will be tolerated; and something that is tolerated may soon be enforced.  This leads us to the question of whether or not we can now enforce anything at all?  Certain sectors and groups would have us believe that we cannot enforce morality, or anything dealing with a moral issue.  Quite to the contrary, since morality is the only thing a government can enforce!  When a government makes laws, they are, as a collective, declaring one set of behaviors ‘right’ and the opposite ‘wrong,’ or at the very least ‘lawful’ and ‘unlawful,’ of which categories would beg the question of how they were determined in the first place.  Nonetheless, my inner ear is not as calibrated as a gymnast’s, and thus I do not have an aptitude for balancing on small edges, particularly corners.  Nor do I think we as a society have such aptitude either, and the longer we try to balance on an ever-decreasing edge, or corner, between having freedoms, but continuing to restrict them, the higher the probability that that edge, or corner, will be sharp enough to slice us into.