I rarely read "The New Yorker", except at the dentist office (for comic relief before I see the Doc) and I actually buy one if I ever have to travel. Anyway, in the Dec.22 issue, they printed an article by Mark Twain. He wrote something called "The Privilege of the Grave." He suggests that there is no free speech, and that we temper our words to fit social circumstances. He writes: "A natural result of these conditions is, that we consciously or unconsciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbor's pitch and preserving his approval that we do to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to it that they are right and sound."
Also, "we supress an unpopular opinion because we cannot afford the bitter cost of putting it forth. None of us likes to be hated, hone of us likes to be shunned."
Except me.
