[at-l] Community Spirit

[RoksnRoots@aol.com (RoksnRoots@aol.com)]

In a message dated 1/21/02 12:10:55 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
gwright@connix.com writes:


> A person's words are still subject to analysis, support, approval,
> disapproval, ridicule, mockery, or even neglect by other people.
> The First Amendment is irrelevant on this matter.
> 

      *** Which to me is like saying if you are on one side of the fence it's 
OK to be set upon. If you are on the government protection side then you're 
safe. If the law says it's OK to strip here do it to your full advantage and 
strip nature bare. If you're on the park border side you're prevented. This, 
to me, is primitive thinking. What happens when both the government and 
people act unwisely? Don't say court, because it just pays-off making the 
violators more careful without solving the central issue. How do you implant 
in an entire society an inner respect for nature? What you end up with is a 
public that is busily playing a game of manipulating rules like a game while 
the whole planet burns in the background. Individuals, companies, governments 
and authorities tend to answer to themselves before they recognize how that 
impacts on a greater scale. The whole planet is the canary.
    What does this have to do with personal opinion given in public? Well, 
it's obvious that this set-up would encourage powerful private interests 
(corporations) to enforce restrictions that the government can't because of 
those protections. A pseudo government follows where rewards are traded 
between the two for keeping things under control. This is true in all types 
of government.  A private non-business group can do whatever it wants in 
terms of tolerating offensive views, but it's clear that the First Amendment 
leads towards allowing this dissent instead of subjecting it to censure. The 
group will determine what it becomes and what it becomes has very much to do 
with internalizing the model given by the constitution. A government's or 
group's reaction to dissent can often tell how well it's doing in that 
regard. A hammer hitting a bell will either ring true or not. There are times 
to ring and times to toll. But the hammer is as much a part of the bell as 
the bell itself...   
    Constitutional protections were obviously there to set an example to be 
built upon anywhere. Those who simply see everything outside the barrier as 
fair game are not living up to that. To court progressive deterioration of 
values with the excuse of "pursuing happiness" is to neglect the higher 
causes those protections sought to encourage...

    As long as more people want to roll at Vegas instead of seeing a local 
endangered habitat survive that simple reliance on public wisdom is a formula 
that won't work unless confronted. I would suggest that scientific proof of 
our mass destruction of the environment is "irrelevant" in the same way...


--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---