First Amendment Day!

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
--First Amendment, U.S. Constitution

We're celebrating the First Amendment today in the Park Library. Journalists make a cottage industry out of loving the First Amendment, and we're no different. Come by any time today to check out any of our books from our one of our subsections devoted to the five protections offered by that most essential of Constitutional sections.

Stephanie Brown, the Park Library Director, and I went down to see the UNC Liberty Tree planted in front of Carroll Hall. Dean Jean Folkerts of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communications and assorted faculty members were on hand to help shovel a little dirt onto the elm, which will grow at the corner (call it the cornerstone?) of the building.

(image via Twitter: @smalljones)

There will be lots of other events going on today to commemorate the First Amendment. Be sure to see Chancellor Holden Thorp and others reading from banned books. (Thorp is going to be reading from Catcher in the Rye, which I thought was fitting, because when I read that book for the first time this summer, he's who I pictured as Holden Caulfield.)

Or you can read about how UNC students demanded their rights to free speech during the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when it was deemed illegal for students to hear from speakers with unpopular views. Students took matters into their own hands and organized a conversation.

But you don't have to do any of that to appreciate those freedoms. Just pick up a copy of the newspaper and be grateful that no one can make the laws that keep it from being printed.