The United States is the gold standard for freedom. This is not to suggest that the United States is the most free place, but rather it is the metric by which other places should judge their position on civil rights and the ability to self-govern. Self-governance that empowers civil rights is the basis for our freedom and as such we often refer to our "democracy" as an aggregate form of this endeavor; opting to deduce its health based on the current political zeitgeist while reducing it to a single salable measure. How that is accomplished, I'm sure I don't know, but others are quite keen on interpreting it for the rest of us. Our democracy exists as the gold standard because, it is the grand 'experiment' of man in the modern era to direct themselves through collective discourse and decision making at scales never before attempted. A peoples made by committee. The keystone of this civil government is the Freedom of Speech which is why it comes first in our train of liberties; a list of freedoms which are ordered in such a way that the previous ones support the subsequent. It is the basis for expressing alarm at social discourse, government action or civil circumstance which would indicate the need for using our collective authority. As such, it would hold that forces intent on destroying the United States would need to subvert the ability to speak freely as a means of unwinding the whole, and no cultural implementation has been more devastating to our ability to raise these alarms through speech than the social hostility toward slurs and the application of 'hate speech'.

Slurs can be understood as a broad range of communications, from the indistinct cultural epitaph to the malicious use of stereotypes and offensive language. Whether it is the antiquated term for Asian people as 'celestials' or the more modern insult of 'chink', slurs are often derived with specific meaning and intended effects. Yet, the social response to slurs and insults are not the same today as they once were. Littered throughout American history one can find the back and forth ethnocentric banter and cultural mudslinging between groups; often newly arrived and eager to stake their claim. The freedom to express oneself through speech meant that these historic insults did not find their way into our legal system and rarely did they define the cultural heritage of our shared endeavors. Whether it was the Irish and Italian immigrants being called 'wop', 'dago', 'micks', to descendants of African slaves clapping back with 'peckerwood' and 'honky', the hostility of other continents and competing agendas was ever present in the American way of life as it fused with our own domestic discontent. Through the Freedom of Speech these words of animosity and division were largely destroyed through the march of assimilation as they became ubiquitous integrations. Until today.

Today we find ourselves among a sea of social justice warriors looking to right the wrongs of the past, and in their minds, whether that past was real or not, the injustice it brings in the present is no less damaging and as such must be fought at all costs. That proxy war is waged against the freedom of speech as a means of redefining acceptable thought. What was once a sacred safe-space of expression has now become a battleground for cultural influence and social construction instead of a cherished entitlement worth preserving. Many of these slurs have come to take a position above and beyond the dreaded curse words and pejoratives of the past; those made popular by media as a superficial way of rebelling against the system, or as a right of passage into ones place as an adult inscribed into the echelons of Americanism. The ability to swear has long been a cherished means of social rebellion in all parts of the world and yet in the place where the Freedom of Speech is not only entitled, but considered inherent to ones own existence, it finds itself under siege.

How do we now find ourselves battling the forces of censorship, and subversive influences over our thoughts and minds? When looking to the present and comparing it to the past a picture begins to surface. One that depicts a manufactured war unleashed by the same media forces that once led the way in rebelling against such containment. Consider if you will, the use of the word sin to imply a socially entropic, or self-degrading action, which when performed has a way of creating collateral damage and unintended consequences, that leads to a slippery-slope of social degradation. In that light, slurs and words of curse have become a form of sin. Sin injected into our collective psyches for the purpose of controlling our minds; just as it's used in a religious context. After decades of breaking the chains on speech and experimenting with lifestyles through drugs and sex, we are now told in no uncertain terms that 'hate speech' is not only wrong, but can also be considered a form of actual violence. Crossing the realm of self-expression through words into mass oppression from speech. This 'hate speech' also appears to be elusive in its definition and precise terminology. It seems to focus on what the listener interprets instead of what the speaker intends as a method of making it immoral.

Creating these golden calves of sinful expression, forms mental plantations in our minds for which we all end up slaving away to conform, or else face the stinging lash of social dissonance. Every channel of communication is influenced by these false idols of disdainful expression; from the most egalitarian form of social media to the largest of corporate broadcasting networks sanctioned by the government for transmission, we have a whole host of slurs which cannot be uttered. The punishment for doing so enacted through the most passive of shadow bans and delistings to aggressive forms of public shaming and legal action. The ability to censor our most cherished freedom is not only growing, but cheered-on in its alteration and destruction.

The media, which once acted as a bulwark against the usurpation of our minds through words, now appears hell bent on reinforcing the new status quo of social distortion. They masquerade as stewards of social cohesion by censoring these words yet they passively promote emotional seething from a culture of freedom fighters predisposed to challenge oppression in all its forms. Now, you can say these words are a form of oppression and thus should be censored as a form of challenge, but I would counter with the division caused by the application of "our words" versus "their words", which has taken the place of a social front against discrimination and replaced it with chasms of guilt and shame, for which a pass is required to traverse without transgression.

In this light, we find new slurs emerging among the populace as clashing cultures, identities, and lifestyles coalesce into a wellspring of changing language. Language which isn't changing as organically as the manufacturers of speech would have you believe. The term "transsexual", "transvestite", "transgender", with the slurred truncation of "tranny" has emerged as a supreme offense in the last few years. In response to this new slur a counter curse has risen to fight the good fight, 'cis', a shortening of the recently invented 'cis-gender' identity which is essentially the opposite of a transgendered person, and its derived slur a response to the emotionally and mentally ravaging use of the term 'tranny'. This tit-for-tat creation of sin is a form of social control through language which is a way to create disorder; the most altruistic intentions being a catalyst for change and ultimate acceptance through civil conflict.

Yet, we find this same form of control in our domains of ethnic discourse, with the term 'Hispanic' being the proper way to refer to peoples from various places south of the United States' border. Until, it needed to be changed to 'Latinx', but what need arose to require the change? It was the need to conform gendered languages to homogeneous contexts as a means of pleasing the herd of the perpetually offended and culturally anxious. A need so dire, the term must now be changed to, 'Latine', as a way of pleasing the people who actually use the language since they outright reject, 'Latinx'. Those with cultural influence are so chaotically and haphazardly changing language it nullifies any possibility of altruistic intents as the feedback received from the ensuing conflict would indicate a holistic rejection of their method if their intentions were honorable. The continued application of their failing methods would indicate alternative agendas. One which leaves the world in cultural tatters for the sake of selling new identities, new lifestyles, and new forms of outrage marketing, betray any assumptions of good will as the truth of profitable opportunism reveals itself.

'Faggot', 'kike', 'nigger', 'spic', 'cunt', 'bitch', 'bastard', 'cis', 'tranny', 'whore', 'loser', 'jerk', at which point do we cross the threshold of 'hate speech' into acceptable slurs and words of curse as a means of self-expression? Does someone have to be called a 'nigger' for the term to bear the full force of historic meaning, or can a simple alteration to the word, even if it contains all the vitriol of its former form, pass for acceptable, nigga? Where are the lines drawn, and by whom are they enforced? Perhaps, the line lives somewhere between uplifting Motown music and self-aggrandizing Hip-Hop; or perhaps it's acceptable for a Mark Twain novel as long as it makes a good point about stereotypes, but not acceptable in a comedy stand-up if the speaker is of the wrong skin color.

In what way does this form of censorship and social oppression reinforce our freedom to speak freely when the form that allows it is based on personal traits and historic assumptions? How far do we go in creating the separate and disequal lexicons of speech before we realize censorship was never the solution; it was always the problem? When will we recognize that division was always the goal of censorship? In the face of sins emergence in our social spheres of unity, we require a sacrifice as a means of embodying our collective outrage, shame, guilt and offense. When keeping oneself from experiencing strong emotions becomes a reinforcing act of perpetuating the negatives of those emotions, we have no choice but to apply a new remedy. In this case, our fear of words and the industry of censorship that has grown up around it, must be ripped off like a band-aid and exposed to the light. In the face of social censorship we must collectively rebel with extreme applications of our freedom of speech. The kind of acts that tear down the walls of manufactured division and orchestrated hate so we can once again build bridges of shared understandings and truthful bonds of cultural connection.

We must sacrifice our histories for the sake of our futures. If censoring the word 'nigger' makes us slaves to the past, then freeing ourselves through exposure is the only way into the future. For within most people in the United States resonates the pang of shame when they hear or even think the word, 'nigger'. Some would consider this progress. I consider it conditioning. As Thomas Jefferson once said, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Every form of tyranny, and that includes Pavlovian language intent on creating violent action through conditioning thereby affirming, through insidious action, that words can be violence and thus our freedom of speech should be limited to only civil forms of discourse.

If I traveled back to 1959 and I ran around town telling everyone I was gay do you think they would assume I was a homosexual or that I was joyful and happy? Words evolve, but only if we let them. Slurs evolve, but they only remain powerful if we codify them as truth. Preserving words like, 'faggot', 'kike', or 'nigger' are a way to create idols of shame and guilt which must be worshiped through the sacrificing of our freedoms as a means of restitution for our supposed historical misdeeds. Passing those words through a filter of acceptable use based on gender, religion, color, creed and the like, solidifies our disunity regardless of the measures we take to absolve ourselves of these social sins. In light of such outcomes, the first step in freeing ourselves from it is to uncensor the landscape of social interactions. From the largest network fined for inappropriate speech to the smallest platform of titanic assholes attempting to one-up each other with slurs and chain-linked swearing, we must resolve ourselves to allow others to say what they mean and mean what they say.

What then will become of civility? Would we not simply devolve into a mess of offended and angry citizens clawing at each other in the most verbally obscene ways? Yes, possibly, for a time. But, civility reached through censorship isn't civility, it's servitude to society, an explicit condemnation of ones own detached culpability and acceptance of ones fate as shameful and wrong. No social fabric can withstand such conflated forms of truth and neither can our social contract. If this experiment is to undergo its final metamorphosis into an evolution of governance we must preserve the Freedom of Speech by fighting all forms of censorship and we must create civility through acceptable forms of cultural reproof not conditioned responses. Otherwise, we only silence the future for the sake of the present and no peoples can advance themselves when shackled to the past. In other words, freedom of speech? Nigger, please.