Liberation Day and the luxury of discomfort

At a funeral I attended, a poem by Toon Tellegen was read. I didn't know it. It was about absence — about the hole someone leaves behind and how that hole slowly changes shape but never disappears.

I think about that on Liberation Day. Not because of the war — I only know that from stories. But because of what freedom actually means: the right to disagree. Not the right to be right, but the right to disagree without this affecting your position as a human being.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against "the danger of a single story." Rowan Atkinson—Mr. Bean, of all people — gave an impressive speech about the right to offend. Douglas Murray writes about a Europe that forgets its own values.

They don't agree with each other. That's exactly the point.

Freedom is not the right to comfort. It's the luxury of discomfort — the ability to be confronted with ideas you don't like and not be destroyed by them.

In a time of safe spaces and deplatforming, of cancel culture and algorithmic bubbles, this is no longer a given. The debate over the debate — I wrote about it in 2006 — is more urgent than ever. Not because there are more opinions, but because the space to express them is shrinking.

Liberation Day is not the day we celebrate that we agree. It's the day we celebrate that we are allowed to disagree. That distinction is everything.