I was reading today’s papers regarding Ontario’s miserable attempt at reigning in its out of control debt / deficit with yesterday’s budget. The papers were unanimous in saying the Grits missed an the opportunity to do things of significance and certainly it did not follow the advice given in its very own Don Drummond Report.
That said, I did not expect much more than was offered up. It will be the next budget that will begin to seriously deal with the Province’s out of control spending. But sadly, once again, the Dalton and boys have postponed the inevitable and by doing so ensures that the remedy, when it comes, will be much more severe than it needed to be had they acted sooner.
Many are clamouring for an election but not your humble servant. McGuinty has spent 9 years digging himself into this hole and it behoves him to be the one to dig himself out. Moreover Ontarians have elected this bozo on three separate occasions so I am not too to sympathetic with their plight either.
But that is not why I am writing this column. In the scheme of things, McGuinty and Company really do not matter when compared to the following story.
Yesterday a British Student, Liam Stacey, was sentenced to 56 days in jail for ‘tweeting’. A Black Footballer had suffered a heart attack on the field and Stacey reprehensibly wrote the following: “LOL F*** Muamba. He’s dead!!!”
The Footballer is recovering in hospital.
The issue here is not whether or not the statement tweeted by Stacey is obnoxious – rather, it is whether or not in a free society the right exists to make such an obnoxious statement and not be fined or go to jail for doing so.
I am a regular viewer of Fox News and many times they have shown clips of militant blacks calling for death to whites even to the point of declaring that this should include “their white babies.” I would say these types of statements do cross the line since they appear to actively promote the killing of white citizens and in that sense go beyond what Liam Stacey was saying. But in another sense, I am glad in a free society to be able to hear such things said since it shows that relations between the races are in serious trouble. As citizens, we not only have the right to know this, but steps to improve relations between the races are unlikely to improve unless we do know the extent of the alienation.
Note too, other than for Fox News, you would never hear what the Black Militants are saying since the main stream media avoids the issue entirely.
But going back to the British Student and his 56 day jail sentence. If he is not free to say what he wants, when he wants, then we are not free to say what we want, when we want and democracy withers and dies.
Democracy does not come about freely, a heavy price has been and will continue to be paid for it. It is not without pain and to be truly free means having to hear others say things we would rather not be exposed to and yet must be.
In the scheme of things, it makes McGuinty’s situation seem small. He is simply bankrupting us, jailing the Stacey’s of the world is taking our freedom away. As for me, I would rather be poor and free than rich and forced silent.
As I see it ..
‘K.D. Galagher’
