To my family, the ability to speak freely and without fear is worth dying for. My parents’ only hope was to raise their children in a land that would not oppress them for daring to speak out, and to their horror, their children’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech is in grave danger.
In the 1970s, my father fled Romania, was thrown into a communist labor camp in Yugoslavia, beaten by guards there, and starved. He eventually got out, made his way to Austria, and applied for asylum to the United States.
It was a difficult journey, but if you ask him he would say he’d do it all again in a heartbeat for the price of free speech and personal freedom.
So it’s ironic — and frankly frightening — that as his daughter attending one of the country’s top universities in the capital of our country, that I am threatened for my speech so much so that I now fear to speak freely and voice my conservative beliefs.
As a junior at Georgetown University, I have been cyberbullied by my peers in such a menacing way that I am now afraid to engage online, or even during class, with my left-leaning peers.
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