Where Your Freedom Ends and Mine Begins?

How far does the freedom of expression of a determined group of people go if their ideologies hurt or even kill those around them? According to the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution, all citizens have the guarantee of protection when they express their opinion publicly. That amendment was created by James Madison within the Bill of Rights, a document that would help the government not repeat the same mistakes that the British government made when governing the U.S. colonies. However, like all laws, the first amendment has limitations when it comes to being exercised. Some of these are hate speech, defamation or distribution of personal information that may be prejudicial to someone.

Although several of these limitations can be considered common sense, some people forget that their freedom ends where the others begin and during the heat of the argument their sight of reason gets lost. This results in people doing unimaginable things without thinking, like what happened last summer in Charlottesville, VA, when James Alex Fields, a member of the White Nationalist group,  was protesting against the decision to remove the statue from the Confederate Robert E Lee of the city and crashed his car against a group of protesters who were in favor of removing the statue. Causing multiple injuries and killing Heather Heyer.

One of the reasons why this act of intolerance by Fields has caused so much controversy at the national level was not much for his actions themselves (which are quite horrendous on their own), but it was for the image that this man reflected, implying that only he and his group have the right to protest freely and that anyone who was not in their favor should be destroyed which was an obvious attack on the first amendment.

It is curious to see how the main argument of the White Nationalists which was to keep the statue in the city for historical reasons, was quickly replaced by the characteristic ethnocentric feeling of the groups that make them up, such as the KKK, and the Neo-Confederates. Even a leader of the KKK, Billy Snuffer, mentioned in his interview with Daryl Davis, an African-American jazz musician, that many of the young people who had participated in the protest, had attended not wanting to preserve a historical monument of the civil war but to cause chaos, spread hatred and start a racial war. This would explain the reason why some of the White Nationalists attended the march armed, what also could be considered a violation of the first amendment since they gave an intimidating image towards those who were protesting against them.

With all this, the only feeling that remains at the end of news of this caliber is a shame. Shame to know that many people take refuge behind the freedom of expression to impose their opinions through violence and intimidation in the 21st century. This shows that even when more than 200 years have passed since the creation of the first amendment, the country still very far from what the founding fathers tried to implement with the Bill of Rights.