The rights we are granted by the First Amendment can only get us so far without our own desire to express ourselves. The individual outlook we have on the world around us and our desire to vocalize it is what drives the idea of democracy forward. The First Amendment is the much-needed barrier that the Constitution gives us to help us truly feel like individuals within our country, and as a result the idea of free expression garners much attention.
When looking at what free expression can accomplish for us, the easiest answer lies in its ability to help us connect. The connection doesn't necessarily have to be a positive one, it can also just as easily exist in the form of antagonizing others we don't agree with. It only makes sense for things to be this way though, because you can't have a free-thinking group of people without there being both some conflict and some agreement.
Take, for example, the concept of "self-fulfillment." People express themselves to create their own identity, learn the identities of others, and then form a bond with them based on whether or not they find things they have in common. You can see this happening within any topic you might be discussing with others, and the important thing isn't whether or not people agree or disagree with you, but that the discussion itself is allowing you to formulate different opinions about everyone individually. If we can't have a conversation where people are able to project their opinions and develop relationships, then the idea of self-fulfillment through free expression becomes lost.
I, personally find this concept to be the most appealing of everything as well as the one I appreciate the most. While, of course, I don't like the idea of people arguing over sometimes trivial matters, I've also been raised in a country that teaches us opinions are important. There may be government censorship and personal censorship and even sometimes a chilling effect the government has on its people, but the ability to speak our minds can never be taken away, and it's thanks to that earlier mentioned protection the First Amendment offers us.
On the other side of that coin comes the question of how many people expressing their beliefs impact their society as a whole. For the most part, our wildly varying opinions actually work to help the country more than hurt it. This is also something I feel is very important to study the state of our country, because I've seen the positive and negative effects that free expression has on the people around me. We don't seem very stable right now what with how divided people are in the world of politics. It's now reached a point in my family where it's rare to hear my own parents refer to a Republican as something other than a "Trump supporter." Quite a few intense flares have come from my father if he's ever goaded to talk with someone whose political agenda doesn't match his own. It's a rare instance where I feel that the idea of free expression promoting tolerance is completely false. Instead, the ability for my father to speak his mind almost fuels his desire to prove others who don't agree with his political views wrong. I might be in the minority with this opinion, but I still think it's something interesting to think about because of how my experiences almost perfectly contradict what free expression is meant to partially represent.
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