I came of age in the sixties—Vietnam, social upheaval, the Beatles—and I remember clearly how I viewed the World War II generation. They seemed old, rigid, and out of step with the times. What I didn’t appreciate then was how little time actually separated us. It had been just 26 years between Pearl Harbor and the day I graduated from the University of Dayton.  A time period that to me now seems fairly insignificant.

At the same time, World War I felt impossibly distant—ancient history, almost on par with the Civil War in my mind.  Yet it had been only 44 years between the end of what was then called The Great War and my first day of college. Twice the time, perhaps—but not nearly enough to justify the sense of detachment I felt.

That’s the trick time plays on us.  It compresses what came before and exaggerates how far we believe we’ve advanced beyond it.

Now that I am in my 80s, I find myself looking at the country with a very different perspective—and a growing unease.  The changes over the past half century have not just been technological or cultural; they have been behavioral and something deeper feels altered.

Americans have never been shy about strong opinions—but what feels different is the growing pressure, both cultural and institutional, to narrow what can be said.  We see it in the policing of language, the public shaming of dissent, and the increasing willingness to treat disagreement as something dangerous rather than something to be aired in the public square.

Far too many Americans fail to understand that the First Amendment is foundational—without it, the Constitution would be just another governing document.  And in the current political climate, we are losing a shared understanding of what it actually protects—and why it matters.

As constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley observed, it functions as the nation’s “pressure-release valve.”  It allows bad ideas to be challenged, unpopular views to be aired, and grievances to be expressed without fear of punishment.

When a society begins to treat offensive or dissenting speech as something to be suppressed rather than discussed persuasion gives way to coercion.

That shift rarely happens all at once.  It begins culturally—through social pressure and the narrowing of what is considered acceptable to say.  That mindset also migrates into institutions, where the temptation grows to formalize those limits in the name of safety or civility.

A rendition of this debate is playing out in European democracies, where governments are taking a more active role in regulating speech deemed harmful or misleading.  However well-intentioned, those efforts carry real risks: once the state assumes the authority to decide what may or may not be said, the boundary of permissible speech is no longer fixed—it becomes political.  And when that happens, free speech is no longer a governing principle.

And that’s the danger when a political faction is convinced the system is so broken, extraordinary measures are justified and begins to treat institutional restructuring as a moral imperative rather than a constitutional restraint.  The argument shifts from “win within the rules” to “change the rules because the stakes are too high not to.”

I don’t know how to make this point any clearer: when dissent is delegitimized, the next step is to reshape the institutions that govern it.  And once that door is opened it’s almost impossible to close.

And that is not an America any of us should want to live in.

Quote of the day: “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom—and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.” – Benjamin Franklin