The Wannabe

I want to preface this post by saying that I am not a prude, or a conservative, or an easily-offended person.  I am very much a liberal and a patriot who would defend my country and the constitution with my life.  I actually wasn’t even offended by the event described below, but rather just…disappointed.

While driving back to work today after the inspection of the house that I’m trying to buy, I noticed a man wearing an odd t-shirt.  On the front of the shirt, in big bold letters, was the statement, “I Love My Dick.”  I glanced back as I passed, certain that the back of the shirt would contain some sort of punch line or advertisement for a politician named Dick or something that would transform the crude statement on the front into a witty play on words.  Sadly, it did not.  The back of the shirt was blank which unfortunately meant that the statement on the front was to be taken at face value.  This man was proclaiming his love for his genitals for all the world to see.

I rolled my eyes and felt a twinge of disappointment for our great nation.  My first thought was, “How does a shirt like that even get made?!”  Someone had to have come up with the idea, put it down on paper, and submitted it to someone for approval as an idea that should seriously be considered for production.  That someone could have been the manager of a local t-shirt shop or some company that produces shirts with strange sayings or images on them.  But either way, someone actually approved the idea and passed it along to yet another person who then applied the statement to a t-shirt.  Some store manager or owner would then had to have approved the shirt as something that was worthy to be sold at their establishment and when this man walked in to purchase the shirt, he had to have judged it as being something he was willing to pay money for.  Finally, he had to have paid some employee who then accepted the money and sold him the shirt.  And out of all those people, not one of them looked at it and said, “Is this really a good idea?’  The sad part is, all of them must have answered, “Yes” or the man wouldn’t have been walking down the street wearing it (I’m assuming that he did not create the shirt himself and that he did, in fact, pay for it).

I’ve grown to expect these kinds of cynical reactions from myself.  However, moments later, my mind wandered into foreign territory: a hypothetical argument against the First Amendment.  What gives that man the right to walk down the street wearing such a blatantly crass and rude statement, at the risk of offending everyone around him and being immediately judged as a lower class of person?  I’m sure if confronted he would reference his freedom of speech, however I’m certain that’s not what our founding fathers intended when they penned the Bill of Rights and the amendments to the Constitution.  These were men who were building a nation that was distinctly separate from a nation of tyranny.  A nation where speaking out against the ruling class would get you beheaded or hung.  A nation where worshiping a different god, or even the same god in a different way, would get you burned alive.  Certainly our founders had a much nobler definition of “freedom of speech.”

It is of course ridiculous to think that someone should be arrested, or that it should even be a crime, for wearing a shirt with a crude statement.  Yet doesn’t it also seem equally ridiculous that the very foundation of our country not only defends such a choice, but also declares that it is one of our rights as a citizen of the United States of America?  After all, history is rife with examples of individuals and groups being persecuted for exercising their freedom of speech.  The McCarthy era, for example, is stained with the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of American communists and socialists, because they spoke out against the government.  And isn’t that precisely what was intended by our founding fathers?  Isn’t that the right that should be defended by our freedom of speech?  Just a thought.

The inspection of the house went well.  No major defects, or even minor ones really.  Some of the rooms felt a little small after I started to measure and envision my furniture in there.  And yet the more time I spent there the more I loved it!  The inspector even found a chimney in the attic that ran down to the living room where a fireplace has been walled up.  I’ll know on Tuesday if the mortgage will go through, although supposedly I’m “pre-approved” so I shouldn’t really have anything to worry about.  Sadly that won’t stop me from stressing myself out with worry all weekend.