CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, I MISS YOU.

Last December 11th was the fifth anniversary of a tremendous loss to those who prized reasoned argument, laced with sardonic wit, wrapped in a husky British accent. Christopher Hitchens would be in his element today, as a staunch defender of free speech in the face of violent anti-speech activism among college students and religious fanatics.

I thought of Christopher Sunday morning after getting annoyed adjacent to Boston Common, where a doe-eyed boy approached me with a clipboard and asked, "Would you like to abolish hate?" I answered in the negative, since I believe hate is sometimes a natural response to being treated hatefully. What I do with that hate is more important than the emotion itself. I asked him whether his initiative, whatever it may have been, would try to interfere with free speech and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. He immediately said, "No." Then he told me how the petitioners would like to pass a law against hate speech. Duh, I thought silently.

I moved on from there. I don't dally with idiots, especially idiots being paid by the likes of George Soros to corrupt the American Constitution. Yes, billionaire George Soros, who profited as an adolescent from the confiscation of the property of Jewish Hungarians, deported to death camps. Why should I look to the likes of George (nee Schwartz) Soros and his paid minions for the moral high ground, much less support their causes? That is the kind of rational thinking that  Hitchens verbalized so eloquently with the detachment of a Zen master in his later years.

Today, after watching the video of the 2010 debate above, I realized how badly discourse has slipped in America to name-calling and Twitter niddling,  Now in 2017 the energetic secularism which Hitchens represented so well has become diluted by those who have caved to acceptance in lieu of principle. They whine that Hitchens and others who strongly expressed their honest rational ideas are/were "too strident" or "too harsh". Yet, these same compromising secularists will rally around the flags of those who are fascistic in their demands for special treatments as victims. They will participate in banning speakers from universities. They will collude with those who strongly adhere to ideologies which are violent, misogynist and homophobic in the name of interfaith cooperation. 

Give me Hitchens and those like him. They will challenge and inspire. They will infuriate and mobilize disagreement against themselves with enthusiasm. They are forgers of nonviolent independent thought, not dictators of oppressive conformist stupidity.