It's painful. It burns you up inside. It makes you angry.

Hearing from or reading about people who express opinions that are extreme, totally opposite of our own or just plain out-there isn't everyone's idea of a fun time. But if we aspire to be true Americans, we should recognize that sometimes allowing such speech to go on is our duty as citizens.

A recent survey by the First Amendment Center discovered that an increasing number of Americans feel that the cornerstone tenet of our Bill of Rights -- the one that begins the great document -- goes too far in the rights it guarantees. The yearly figure has risen from 22 percent in 2000 to 39 percent last year to 49 percent this summer.

This is a shocking figure. During a year when there was so much talk about what it was going to take to defend the freedoms we enjoy in this nation, nearly half of the people polled in July said we might do well to rein some of those freedoms in.

Have so many of us really given up the will to speak? Not necessarily.

The name of a book by free-speech advocate and author Nat Hentoff -- written 10 years ago -- still sums up one of the problems today. It's called Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other. As the subtitle indicates, this isn't entirely the fault of either liberals or conservatives.

We can imagine a diverse selection of people from different places along the political spectrum arguing that the First Amendment shouldn't let them spout their views.

These wishes to censor -- spoken or not -- range from political correctness run rampant to dangerously silent acceptance.

It's important to realize that there is a line that divides intimidation and threats from merely outlandish speech. There's no doubt the latter can hurt, but not as much as the former -- and the law protects against those threats.

Finding that dividing line can be a challenge at times, but that's a task we as a nation of communities should be up to.

Remember that the mainstream and the accepted in today's dialogues could have been the radical and the extreme of yesteryear.

Fuel for the engine of social progress comes in healthy doses from the essence of our freedom of speech.

The ability of each and every one of us to tell our government how we feel and to shape this nation out of our greatest ideas can be a weighty responsibility.

Historians and radio talk-show hosts know: We all disagree -- a lot. But that's no reason to end this fascinating years-old debate.