We are free to be former strangers, waist deep in toxic flood water conquering chaos with anything that floats or, pretending to be police, steal what's left behind.
How we respond to life events, be they devastation, diversity, or deportation, defines us. We're free to respond to violence in-kind, or with the kind of courage that bespeaks heroic civility.
We are free to freely share our humanity with all life in peril, filling the void of neglectful leadership threatening American security, or collude to hack the American Dream of every hue and persuasion of dreamers, to erect towers in tribute to self-aggrandizing babble.
We have the freedom to listen, choose to plan and take-action to save ourselves from a planet we've not spared human avarice, or impose selective equal opportunity, perpetuating climate injustice, with malice aforethought toward our Grid and infrastructure core.
It's not the loud mouth bully rallying mass ovation. It's the willing minions, happily embracing vulgarity, scorn and domestic violence.
It's not hard-working Middle Class Blue Collar Midwest Families. It's the smooth-talking excuse making masters of deception, like Christopher Ruddy and Vice President Mike Pence, serving up palatable bigotry, to unsuspecting palates.
The violent are free to choose labels of provocation, but reason champions peaceful assembly to resist dueling myopic reruns of cyclical attempts to isolate American Exceptionalism by drowning American diversity in self-destructive nationalism.
While Freedom of Speech does allow politicians, presidents and even Open Carry White Supremacists, protesting as full throttled foul-mouthed provocateurs of violence, permeating prevarications aided and abetted by orange marmalade -- it isn't permission to answer violence with violence.
Constitutional free speech does not condone collusion with a foreign power, violation of the Emolument Clause nor a get out of jail free card for multi-million-dollar white collar crime.
Freedom of Speech isn't freedom to flaunt presidential pardon power, but to uphold our Constitutional utopian dream of color blind justice -- perhaps under the watchful eyes of computer nerds blocking hackers, rational voters holding the line against torch lit revivals of Jim Crow and Bill of Rights defenders embracing balance and reason in response to cue sticks sharpened into spears.
Freedom of Speech is our non-violent right to resist, to march in advocacy, to petition the government with our physical presence, elevating blind justice over blind ambition.
Regardless of craven heads craving all that glitters, Freedom of Speech is not a gold hammer and sickle for Alt-Right terrorism and Antifa violence to assassinate our First Amendment, nor is it license to abolish peaceful assembly.
The first ten Amendments to our Constitution are neither optional nor a welcome mat for Karl Rove's Citizens United Supremes to bestow on Corporatism, unprecedented electoral power.
The Great Recession is the recurring nightmare flooding voting booths with psychological insecurity -- attempting to make elections moot, by voter intimidation and manipulation -- to render all government levels and branches vulnerable to moral decay and character bankruptcy.
Our freedoms have been purchased by blood, sweat, tears and taxes, most recently tasked with inspiring the resilience of those so tragically impacted by Hurricane Harvey, with the humanity of those standing in line to volunteer assistance.
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