When I lived in the Washington, D.C., region, I enjoyed occasional Saturday morning visits to Lafayette Square to see what the protesters were up to.
Lafayette Square sits directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The park is often packed with people exercising their right to free speech.
Organized Chaos
The Saturday morning I visited, a large group of hispanic protesters was demanding “living wages,” acceptance of bilingual education and amnesty for illegal immigrants.
A dozen other protesters stood on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue. They called themselves “Freepers,” for “freedom protesters.” Each became a Freeper through FreeRepublic.com, an online forum for independent grassroots conservatives working to roll back decades of government overreach and to root out fraud and corruption.
Crossing back over Pennsylvania Avenue to talk with anti-nuclear-weapons activists, I was almost knocked over by a roller-hockey player. Two games were going on amid tourists and protesters, but the Park Police didn’t care; hockey players have as much right to the park area as any other American citizens do.
Between two anti-nuclear-weapons signs sat an elderly woman with a sunburned face. According to her handout, she came from Spain in the late 1960s, married, had a daughter, got divorced and lost custody of her daughter. She essentially lived across from the White House, protesting nuclear weapons all day long.
As I chatted with her, two women dressed as ninja warriors approached. They carried a white sheet with a message written in Spanish. Forgetting most of the Spanish I’d learned in college, I asked the Spanish anti-nuclear-weapons lady to translate what the two women were protesting.
“They’re protesting the evils of capitalism,” she said.
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Suddenly, the protesters who had been demanding amnesty, living wages and bilingual education began marching toward me on their way to the White House. They were blowing whistles and cheering as they reiterated their demands through a megaphone.
Suddenly, Pennsylvania Avenue was a sea of tourists, protesters of every stripe and hockey players in the heat of competition. The energy, noise and enthusiasm were a symphony of organized chaos enabled by a government that gave everyone there the right to protest it.
What Real Oppression Looks Like
I’ve worked in Saudi Arabia a few times—and still remember the military presence ready to pounce at any moment.
While some Gulf states have opened limited spaces for free expression, Saudi Arabia continues to forbid meaningful public protest outright. Citizens there risk severe punishment for criticizing the government or its religious rules.
In China, the memory of Tiananmen Square still haunts a nation where even mild online dissent can lead to disappearance or “re-education.”
In Russia, citizens who dare protest President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine are dragged away, fined into ruin, imprisoned or worse.
In Iran, brave women and young people who took to the streets to protest the regime’s oppressive morality police and mandatory hijab laws faced beatings, jail time and worse.
More recently, Iran’s security forces have killed thousands of protesters, according to human rights groups, often mowing them down with live fire, while the regime has increasingly used executions, mass imprisonment and brutal intimidation to silence dissidents and political opponents.
Taking Freedom for Granted
Too many take the right to protest for granted in America—they take our incredible freedoms for granted.
Of course, that is the challenge with freedom.
Real freedom opens the floodgates to everything that is good in the human heart—justice, integrity and generosity—but it also opens the floodgates to everything that is not so good, including the freedom to be wrongheaded.
Too many Americans look at our imperfect country and see only unfairness. They focus on remaining gaps in wealth or outcomes rather than the unmatched freedoms that let us debate and fix our challenges.
Yet the real oppressors—in Tehran, Moscow and Beijing—show what true unfairness looks like.
All I know is that the First Amendment, when properly respected and practiced, is a wonderful right to experience.
I witnessed it in all its glory in Lafayette Square one sunny Saturday morning not so long ago.
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