It was February 1964 and as was the family tradition we were watching the Ed Sullivan Show, a Sunday evening television variety show that ran on CBS from 1948 into 1971. That evening the BIG event was the first live television appearance of the Beatles. The nation was in the grip of “Beatlemania.” At the end of their performance, my father solemnly announced” “that’s not music, it is just a bunch of noise.” I think we were referred to the true musical offerings of Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, either of the Dorsey brothers, Diana Shore, Doris Day and some others. Like so many in the greatest generation the 1960s were confusing times as he watched the country enter a period of cultural and civil unrest. Everything was changing. More than once he lamented that if the world would stop, he might just get off.I think that is just the course of things as we grow older. Some times the new normal is exciting and endlessly fascinating. Sometimes the new normal is just, …. well, new. No big deal. And sometimes we become our fathers and mothers wondering if the world will just stop at the next corner and we can get off this confusing bus.

You live long enough and you can look back and see moments when the world changed. For the United States September 11th was this generation’s Pearl Harbor. It was a clarion call for unity. But within the same generation January 6th was the revelation of deep rifts within this Constitutional Republic. It was a day in which the Church celebrated the traditional date of the Epiphany of the Lord and a day I walked into our friary living room and could not comprehend what was unfolding as mobs invaded the Capitol. I can not imagine what my dad, a WWII vet, would have thought of those people.

October 7th may well be one of those revelatory days. From sitting members of Congress, regardless of their views of the Israel-Palestinian situation who are unable to condemn a terrorist attack, to tenured university professors who remarked that they were “exhilarated” to see Hamas strike back at the Israelis, to Jewish students having to see shelter in the Columbia University Library, to the wide-spread SJP (Student for Justice in Palestine) calling October 7th a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance” – it makes we wonder about the limits of one of our most valued Constitutional rights: free speech.

The Free Press website has an insightful article, “Where Free Speech Ends and Lawbreaking Begins” by Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. It is nuanced article offering all manner of example of when speech is protected and when it can crosses over to law breaking. Take a break in your day and give it a read.

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