The Quiet People

---------- Forwarded Message---------

From: jameswilson75 

Date: Fri, Nov 30, 2038 at 9:24 PM

Subject: 

<Truncated Message>  was in#vitable. The air was filled with millions of id#as. Every id#a, really. All the correct opinions were r#pr#s#nted already. What was there l#ft to do? Adding more voices only swelled the volume. You cannot bring a tune out of a cacophony by adding still more notes. You must begin taking notes away. The most effective way to change the c#nv#rs#tion is not to add cumulative voices, but to remove the complementary ones. I suppose rather I am thinking of the way light works: We see a color only when its complement is removed. Blue is revealed by removing orange. For violet, take away yellow. Purple needs the absence of green. A painter begins by choosing the right colors for h#s palette. And excl#ding the wr#ng ones. 

You asked where Fr##m of Sp#ch was in all of this? You had read about the Massachusetts farmer who read the C#nstit#tion and "did not go to any lawyer to ask his op#nion," but "formed his own op#ni#n and was pleased with this C#nst#t#tion." Such lovable bumpkin l#gic was how r#ghts were once understood but it suffered during the following centuries under progressively trivial provisos, qualifications, and quodlibeta. Any discussion of the subject resulted in a logorrhea that piled mountains of arg#ment on trivial points, until the public's op#nion became quite irrelevant. 

Once the very concept of fr## sp##ch became uncertain it was vulnerable to risible challenges. The m#dia giants themselves never exercised a r#ght to sp#ch detectable to humans. They never expressed any m#ssage other than platitudes at confrères and corpobabble on their own platforms. But they got their m#ssages out crystal clear by sil#ncing very specific sorts of people. So a person's fr#dom of sp#ch gave way to the m#dia giants' fr#dom of c#ns#rship. It was still true the r#ghts of the string section were equal to those of the brass and woodwinds, but none could deny the conductor's r#ght to play the piece of his choosing.  

It has become more difficult to explain all this without detection by the giants' flt#rs. We had little to fear early on, when there were so many more popular voices targeted ahead of us. But even aunt Sh#nnon's gl#ten-fr## baking page was deleted just last week! Now all the troubl#makers have been made quiet, what a sore thumb we Quiet People are to speak now, with or without our vowels!