by Georgina Gamble ’29 on November 20, 2025
Opinion
I had the pleasure of attending Father Sicard’s panel, With Mutual Respect: Discussions on Contemporary Challenges, this past Thursday, Nov. 13. Although honestly, my primary motivations for showing up were to receive extra credit for some classes, this year’s discourse on the nuances of free speech left me thoroughly engaged, pondering, and in the best way, patriotic.
We’ve all learned about them at some point in our lives: the Constitution. The First Amendment. I am almost certain that most of us can rattle off our Miranda Rights to some extent. Except for tedious history classes and the occasional trip to an American history museum, have we ever stopped and taken a minute to actually appreciate what these old documents mean?
We are living in an era of severe turmoil in America. That’s not necessarily something to be proud of. To me, the bickering itself is something of a miracle. We live in a special country: our founders, in their antiquity, were ahead of their time. These 300-year-old dead guys were probably more liberal than some of our own grandparents. Their goal was simple: they wanted their citizens to discuss, debate, and yell for what they cared about, no matter who or what was being called out in the process. We have the ability to hold our leaders accountable without penalty. We can organize, assemble, petition, and write about issues that we care about, without a catch. There are no consequences. Many countries didn’t have this right back then, and a good handful still aren’t even close to achieving it now.
Despite the chaos in today’s political climate, the pure idea of democracy instilled in America’s founding brings me a spark of hopeful patriotism. What’s even more of a privilege than the First Amendment on its own is our freedom of speech to discuss our freedom of speech, as our college has done during this panel. To be so at ease with our civil liberties that we can critique, praise, and question them is very telling of our American identity. Despite our polarization and divisions, we are still united through the strands of democracy we care about the most. We all want to shout our grievances, protest injustices, and fume over politics at the dinner table, no matter our side of the battle. We know that there are no ramifications to these uses of our voices—our only enemy is each other.
I have faith that we will realize the privilege we have to live in this nation, to argue for what we think needs to be heard without fear of arrest or capital penalty, only fear that our neighbors might throw us a dirty look at the grocery store. A collective refresher on the rights embedded in the threads of our nation would not (and should not) stop the fighting, but would maybe bring the fighting a little closer together. I think what America needs right now is something of a Constitutional group hug.