Imagine everyone’s life without freedom of speech. We all have our own views on every topic such as movies, music, politics, sports, books, etc. What if we were unable to share how we felt on those topics? The definition of Freedom of Speech according to the dictionary is the legal right to express one’s opinions freely.

Not being able to have our opinion would be impossible for us teenagers, as we all are very opinionated. What would we do if we couldn’t share our views on a topic or we couldn’t have our own thoughts?

It would be as if we handed the government a big censor and if the government did not like what certain people were saying, they could just censor it, or put them into jail, or even put them to death like they do in some other countries.

While there are some problems with freedom of speech, the benefits definitely outnumber the negatives.

The main issue is when people speak negatively about certain races, religions, and sexuality. While these opinions are offensive, we have to remember that some of our opinions might be offensive to other groups of people. Would we want our opinions to be silenced because someone else found them offensive?

The issue lately, not only in Charlottesville, has been that some people feel the need to voice their opinion in such a way that there has been physical conflict between different groups of people with different views.

However, if the government were to limit freedom of speech, life for everyone would be changed because there would be no true sharing of opinion on certain topics. We would be told that we can think this way and we can’t have our own opinions.

So even though there might be some problems with freedom of speech, life without it would be way worse. We are able to fix the problems with freedom of speech, but we would be incapable of fixing something if we did not have it.