Speak up now, or lose your voice forever

In my column last week, I made a rather quick comment about how the country is endangered by a current tendency of people not to "speak up and say what they believe."

A few people wrote that they were puzzled by this observation, so I thought I would elaborate on what I consider to be the chief danger of political correctness - its ability to silence opposing points of view.

The ultimate problem, of course, is not that our citizenry is unable to speak up or unwilling to speak up for their beliefs, but that they are afraid to speak up because they don't want to look prudish, or backwards, or uncool. Not all people, of course. A few will always be willing to go against the tide, to speak up for what they believe.

But others cannot handle the abuse. In particular the people who "cling to guns or religion," as Barack Obama crudely put it, or the people who value the American way of life and the laws and traditions on which it is founded. More and more, they seem to be silenced and terrified to speak out. Fundamentalist pastors are held up for ridicule because they preach from the book on which our civilization is based. Soldiers are called cold-blooded killers because they do their duty. You and I are shamed because we hold to traditional values.

I mean there's no doubt that people who think marriage is something that takes place between a man and a woman, people who trust and admire the U.S. military, people who believe the Bible - all these people are considered by today's mainstream media and the left wing which it serves to be freakish Neanderthals. They may not be locked up - yet - but they are ostracized and minimized, pointed at and laughed at like animals in a zoo.

So it's no wonder some people tell me they don't want to submit a letter to the editor because they aren't interested in having their beliefs mocked or their God scorned.

Of course, that technique of social control has been around for thousands of years. It's called shaming, and it works whether or not right is on your side. The Nazis used it to embarrass and humiliate the good Germans - yes, they did exist - so that they felt less and less comfortable rising up to defend human rights, human dignity and the rule of law. "Jew lover! Don't you love your country?" came the accusations.

That experience, along with many others through history, clearly reveals that you don't need to have a majority in order to successfully take power through shaming. All it takes is a willingness to call people names. "Homophobe!" "Neo-con!" "Bush lackey!" "Racist!" It doesn't matter what name you use; people's internal shame mechanism will reflexively recoil against it, and the result will at least temporarily be silence.

Even one person can shame and destroy an individual through name-calling, as the horrifying experience of domestic abuse plainly reveals. "You fat whore! Worthless piece of meat!" Whatever the insulting words, the message is always the same: "Shut up and learn your place."

Of course, that's just what most abused women do. They shut up. The same thing most good Germans did during the years prior to World War II. They shut up and thus, for the most part, stayed alive.

But what many abused women learn, usually through some sort of intervention, is that finding their voice is another way of staying alive, a far more rewarding one, and that telling someone you aren't going to put up with their abuse anymore is an empowering experience. And it turns out that most abusers are not dangerous when they are stood up to; rather they are opportunistic cowards who will slink away when confronted.

Certainly, the German people had many years in which they could have turned back the Nazi menace and saved millions of lives if they had simply stood up to the intimidation and defended what they believed in their hearts to be right.

But it's not easy. Doing the right thing never is.

Today, believers in traditional values are mocked as if they were primitive people who ought to be embarrassed to live in the modern world. The trouble is, we should ALL be embarrassed to live in the modern world, and the fact that so many of us don't know it shows just how far from truth we have strayed.

The fact is that while America has spent the last 50 years trying to prevent the world from turning into the totalitarian nightmare of "1984," we have insidiously morphed into the tepid insouciance of "Brave New World" instead.

The liberal ideal that we are being shamed to accept is a world without war and poverty just like the world Aldous Huxley described in his 1932 novel. Of course, that "utopia" is achieved only through brainwashing, drugs and the homogenization of mankind through elimination of all environmental influences such as family, culture and religion and their replacement with sex and drugs.

Don't believe in gay marriage? What's wrong with you!

Don't think marijuana should be legal? What are you afraid of?

Don't believe in teen-age sex? Get your head out of the Bible!

We are assured over and over again that every day in every way we are getting better and better. It's the inexorable march of progress and if you don't go along with it, you will be plowed under! So eventually, after hearing it for months, years, decades, people give in, they give up, they go along to get along.

But, of course, as long as there is no war or poverty, everything is fine, right? Except that the only way to end war is to say there is nothing worth fighting for, and as soon as you do that you have surrendered the most precious possession you have - your dignity.

Far better to speak up and be called names, than to stay silent and lose your soul.

. Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com