Today I am competing for one of 22 $5,000 scholarships celebrating the birthday of the first amendment. So here a few reasons of why the first amendment is so important to me:
When I was 12, I was nearly expelled from school (suspended for 10 days) for writing “Mississippi Sucks” on a section divider in my notebook. When my teacher asked me why I did it, I said I had a first-amendment right to say it. Turns out schools can write their own rules. That is wrong.
Money is not speech. It never has been and never should be. Saying money is speech equates a person’ worth to their income. The point of free speech and democracy is to give everyone the equal right to air out their grievances, not to buy all the airtime so no one else can.
I hate those “bleeps” in TV shows and music. At one time, women were not allowed to show their arms in public. “Decency” is subjective. Free speech is not.
Because if we didn’t have Twitter, the Arab Spring would have been reported solely through state-run media outlets and the truth would have never been known.
Because with Twitter, a child in Somalia can be as free to reach the rest of the world as a celebrity in California.
Today, tomorrow, always, we are #freetotweet
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Rebekah Jones 