Here is what remains of hostage posters after being scraped off a telephone pole near here. It’s as though these hostages don’t exist and what caused their captivity never happened, they are being erased, cancelled. This is probably part of the intention of whoever obliterated these posters.
All of the posters shown in a previous post, "Remember the hostages", have been torn down; I saw an older man meticulously peeling and scraping one of the posters from where it had been glued, he was using an exacto knife to do this. Indeed, in reaction to the tearing down of these posters, a neighbouring community has said that anyone removing similar posters will be fined up to $1K.
A few days ago, while walking by Concordia University on Sherbrooke Street West, I found posters with fairly offensive and ignorant comments scrawled across them. Whoever this person with a felt pen is he doesn't care about freedom of speech or that there are still over two hundred innocent people being held by terrorists; the person who wrote on the posters doesn't care about the hostages, or about freedom, or about truth, or about decency, he is full of righteous indignation, hate, and ignorance. Freedom of speech seems minor when placed in the context of war and people held as hostages; but freedom of speech is always significant and many people have lost their lives defending this freedom, defending it against censorship and cancellation. If we deny freedom of speech, in this case including destroying posters and writing on posters, we have descended to the level of this person who has written over hostage posters. In many respects we have moved into a very dark age and, I suspect, this darkness will last a very long time. This dark age hasn’t just begun but it has certainly gotten much worse.
| I think not . . . The evidence is to the opposite view . . . |
