Answer:People are horrible at keeping secrets. As in, really, really bad at it (no matter what anyone may tell you to the contrary). And you know what? We’re right to be. Just like the two Rhesus Macaques in the picture above, we have an urge to spill the beans when we know we shouldn’t—and that urge is a remarkably healthy one. Resist it, and you may find yourself in worse shape than you’d bargained for. And the secreter the secret, the worse the backlash on your psyche will likely be.
I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne. I first dreaded him when my older sister came home with a miserable face and a 100-pound version of The House of the Seven Gables. I felt my anxiety mount when she declared the same hefty tome unreadable and said she would rather fail the test than finish the slog. And I had a near panic attack when I, now in high school myself, was handed my own first copy of the dreaded Mr. H.
Now, I’ve never been one to judge books by size. I read War and Peace cover to cover long before Hawthorne crossed my path and finished A Tale of Two Cities (in that same high school classroom) in no time flat. But it was something about him that just didn’t sit right. With trepidation bordering on the kind of dread I’d only ever felt when staring down a snake that I had mistaken for a tree branch, I flipped open the cover.
Luckily for me, what I found sitting on my desk in tenth grade was not my sister’s old nemesis but The Scarlet Letter. And you know what? I survived. It’s not that the book became a favorite. It didn’t. And it’s not that I began to judge Hawthorne less harshly. After trying my hand at Seven Gables—I just couldn’t stay away, could I; I think it was forcibly foisted on all Massachusetts school children, since the house in question was only a short field trip away—I couldn’t. And it’s not that I changed my mind about the writing—actually, having reread parts now to write this column, I’m surprised that I managed to finish at all (sincere apologies to all Hawthorne fans). I didn’t.
But despite everything, The Scarlet Letter gets one thing so incredibly right that it almost—almost—makes up for everything it gets wrong: it’s not healthy to keep a secret.
I remember how struck I was when I finally understood the story behind the letter – and how shocked at the incredibly physical toll that keeping it secret took on the fair Reverend Dimmesdale. It seemed somehow almost too much. A secret couldn’t actually do that to someone, could it?
Explanation:
The dissenters in the flag-burning case and their supporters might at this juncture note an irony in my argument. My point is that freedom of conscience and expression is at the core of our self-conception and that commitment to it requires the rejection of official dogma. But how is that admittedly dogmatic belief different from any other dogma, such as the one inferring that freedom of expression stops at the border of the flag?
The crucial distinction is that the commitment to freedom of conscience and expression states the simplest and least self-contradictory principle that seems to capture our aspirations. Any other principle is hopelessly at odds with our commitment to freedom of conscience. The controversy surrounding the flag-burning case makes the case well.
The controversy will rage precisely because burning the flag is such a powerful form of communication. Were it not, who would care? Thus were we to embrace a prohibiton on such communication, we would be saying that the 1st Amendment protects expression only when no one is offended. That would mean that this aspect of the 1st Amendment would be of virtually no consequence. It would protect a person only when no protection was needed. Thus, we do have one official dogma-each American may think and express anything he wants. The exception is expression that involves the risk of injury to others and the destruction of someone else`s property. Neither was present in this case.
