Enough

So Charlie Daniels is explaining life to the Hollywood types. Yeah, well. I don’t know about all these people who keep saying “and you risked lives!”

I grew up, for some of my childhood, in the small state of New Hampshire. I think it had more of an effect on me than I realized at the time: ten solid years of looking at the damned license plates, see.

“Live free or die.”

Four words. Four deeply meaningful, deeply felt words.

I’m so tired of people who tell me that I have to give up my freedom in order to save lives. Sean Penn may be an asshole — I think there are other celebs who would have been a better choice, particularly if you look at what Sean Penn actually said — but that’s really beside the point. He’s got the right to free speech: to freedom. Calling him a traitor because he exercises that right in a way Charlie Daniels doesn’t like?

I’ll tell you what. I call that cowardly. I call that running scared. I call that giving up on freedom.

The second you cross the line from “I disagree” to “You shouldn’t say that,” you’re crossing the line from supporting free speech to opposing free speech. And I think that’s a lousy idea. Charlie Daniels crossed the line. Does it make him a traitor? No. Does he have the right to say what he did? You bet.

But by saying it he reveals himself as a pathetic individual and a coward. He’s so scared of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and the like that he’s willing to give up the fundamental freedoms that made this country great, and he’s hiding his fear behind the red white and blue. In my book, that makes him a sad, sorry little man.