“If liberty means anything at all, it is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” —  George Orwell, “Animal Farm.”

Seems that growing segments of Americans, the media, corporations, religions and assorted virtuous institutions no longer agree.

Speaking your mind can get you fired. Speaking your mind can gather a crowd outside your house, yelling expletives deleted at you and your children or grandchildren.

Let us learn from George Orwell.

Speaking your mind can get you censored, thrown off social media and brought before a tribunal of thought inquisitors in colleges and elsewhere.

Speaking your mind can get a goof who knows nothing about history screeching obscenities in your face and spraying spittle in your eyes.

Speaking your mind has become a threat to our well-being, peace of mind, quality of life, standard of living, livelihood and a good night’s sleep.

We have yet to coin a satisfactory word to accurately describe the assaults on our our natural, constitutional, human and civil rights. But it wallows in some familiar dark threats history has suffered through:

It seeks not compromise or negotiation. It requires complete agreement, no, actual subservience and surrender. It is the tabernacle of the full and total truth. It seeks to silence, if not eliminate its enemies, which include liberals who used to espouse free expression.

It insists on redefining the concept of “American”–something that is more than a state of mind, but an agreed-upon concept that provide fertile ground for liberty, opportunity and equality. It can’t tolerate the idea that “American” is an ethnicity, one that embodies the uniquely America ethic.

Sure, we have often failed to realize our goals of freedom and equality, but they are our goals, nonetheless. Those ideals have lured millions of people to America for exactly that striving for what is good and free in the human spirit. The Constitution’s words, “…in order to form a more perfect union,” recognizes America’s imperfect conditions and its aspirations for something better.

But we don’t reach what’s better by genuflecting to the screaming, mindless rhetoric of the mobs that have taken over the black lives matter movement and made its just demands a rationale for their disfunction and violence.

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right” — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

King made this call for honesty and bravery in a different time,  when American culture, practice and laws made discrimination against black people and minorities legal and acceptable.

We have moved well beyond those times, despite what the apostles

Do the cancel culture mobs remember the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

of “racism in our DNA” blather about. But would not King say the same thing today as around him as autocrats and elites trample upon his dream that “… my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”?

For saying those words, King’s statue today could get vandalized or pulled down.

King’s and Orwell’s voices will not be silenced by this pack of anti-democratic and oppressive brats. But sadly, today the voices of the many who agree with King, the Founders and others who value liberty are being chocked, even snuffed out by the radical extremists.

Even some Republicans, who define themselves as the guardians of individual rights are intimidated into silence. But mostly, this disease has invaded the halls of Democrats who once were the champions of equal rights for all.  Their silence, to me, is most hurtful. And the most dangerous.

So, gather your courage, for the good of all of us, and speak out. It is not only your right. In this land of the free and home of the brave, it is your responsibility.