Censorship Gone Bad
To a certain extent, I can understand censorship. Parents want to protect their innocent children from the cruelties of the world. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, along with swearing and blasphemy, are not elements of life that young people need to be exposed to.
This being said, it is not possible to shelter children forever. Eventually they are going to step into the real world, where people swear and deny religion, and all other manner of censorship-worthy acts.
I can understand wanting recording artists to make two different versions of a CD, a clean one and a vulgar one. It is right to give people the option of whether or not they want to hear cursing and bad lyrics. As long as it is not forced upon people, and the artists don’t lose any of their creative rights, I cannot see anything wrong with this. I would never buy the “clean” version, but that is a choice people should have.
There is one censored item that concerns me more than anything else: books. There have been countless examples throughout the past century of school districts trying to ban certain books from being read. In the case of Ray Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451,” the book was censored because it had words such as “damn” and “hell” in it. Any middle schooler who has not heard these words lives a sheltered life indeed.
In Eighth Grade, I read “The Giver.” This is yet another book that angry parents have tried to get banned, because it shows unfavorable treatment of children in an indifferent fashion. As an 8th grader, this never even crossed my mind. I loved the book, mostly because it portrayed a society that was so clearly far from reality that it fascinated me.
This censorship is never a good idea. For one thing, America is supposedly all about freedom of speech. What kind of example are we setting for younger generations if we tell them that they can say whatever they want, but be careful because if people don’t approve, you will get in trouble? For another thing, banning and censoring books just makes people more likely to want to read them.
Just because a book is banned, does not mean it is going to just disappear. The only way to effectively ensure that no one reads books is to physically destroy them. How is this done? By burning them. Isn’t that what the Nazis did? Censoring books brings us very close to the level of Nazi Germany, which is an unfavorable parallel indeed.
Any book that has negative content should not be censored. The educational content of the book is what counts, and so what if there are a few swear words here and there? So what if the book was written by an alleged Communist? This is the year 2008. You can’t hide anymore.
