Democracies don’t die when people stop agreeing; they die when people stop dissenting. The loud, awkward, sometimes offensive voices are not a nuisance in a free society—they’re proof the system is still breathing.
We like to think “decency” means keeping things calm and polite. But genuine decency involves the courage to say, “This is wrong,” when power would rather you stay silent. The “decent” citizen who never questions authority isn’t truly decent; they’re just obedient.
That’s why dissent is always the first target of any controlling system. Not murderers. Not fraudsters. Not the genuinely dangerous. No, the temptation is to start with the inconvenient. Today, that often means immigrants, students, and visa holders. ICE and DHS don’t just police borders; they’re increasingly policing opinions—trawling social media, flagging protest, and turning lawful speech into a quiet risk factor for deportation.
On paper, the First Amendment belongs to “the people,” not just citizens. In practice, the easiest place to test new forms of control is with those who have the weakest political footing. If you can punish an international student for a tweet, you’ve just built a working model of speech control that can be scaled later. The laboratory is immigration; the product can be rolled out to everyone else.
That’s where the “protection of dissent” comes in. If decent people, like us, sit this out because they dislike the protesters’ slogans or hashtags, they’re missing the plot. The issue isn’t whether we agree with the content of dissent. The issue is whether the government can quietly attach a price and a punishment to dissent, leaving only the reckless or the desperate willing to speak.
History is blunt: once it becomes dangerous to disagree, it eventually becomes dangerous to be different.
The accurate measure of our decency is whether we will stand up for the right to dissent for those we disagree with, before the machinery to silence them turns on us. NeverFearTheDream simplebender.com
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