All that is left are some wildflowers on the table. Everything else is too hot to touch, too controversial to mention, too bitter a pill to swallow. I have lived under tighter and tighter rules of censorship for years now. I know the freedom to speak freely all too well, and how it feels to lose it. The lines tighten every day and not just here. In the states, what you can and cannot say, where and when are driven by self-righteous mob logic, no matter who decides. It is this wish to control others, to dictate what is allowed and what is forbidden, like children deciding they want ice cream for dinner - this is what makes me shrink back, this is what makes me stare at the flowers on the kitchen table and wonder who this could offend, who would happily draw a line in the sand and say "you have crossed it."
There is no preferential freedom of speech - it exists or it does not. And right now, we are not just entering an age when every word must be carefully vetted before it passes our lips, no we are up to our necks in this era of isolated group think, and language politics. We do not make wars, we "address conflicts." Charismatic leaders do not lie any more, they speak "clever and compelling" instead. We do not express the complexity of situations, acts and events - no, we judge them in milliseconds, we levy guilty sentences as easily as we pick our noses - a crude act that hopefully no one saw. One mob says they are starting a revolution, another mob says they are the saviours of democracy. And here I sit on the other side of the world, seeing no revolution and the barest excuse for a democracy and I am scared to even write these words.
A lie is no longer a lie. A war is no longer a war. The news is no longer journalism.
Language is flexible. It evolves. Some words die, or are forgotten. But the freedom to use them, to juxtapose, to bend and twist and repurpose them - it is something I always took for granted. I was a fool, writing books, writing plays, writing songs, writing screenplays. I have already written one that is unreadable because it is not politically correct. No one will ever see it, this I know. It will sleep in a drawer, a miniature flag for a country of one, limp in the sky, withering slowly as those wildflowers on the kitchen table until it is just a husk, an eerie reminder of what I used to be able to say, of what was allowed, of what we all made room for.
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