Congress shall make law respecting an establishment of religion, prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, of the press; the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
As governmental forces push ever closer to censorship of the Internet through legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and a thousand other special interest bills based in a sense of relative morality, we now risk losing the gift of seemingly infinite knowledge granted to us through the internet. The congressional officers who were elected of the people, by the people, and for the people now seem anything but, pushing ignorance upon their citizens in exchange for ‘corporate welfare’ and a good Christian’s sense of morality, all the while forgetting the history that sought to make them the protectors of liberty.
During the Red Scare in the 1920’s Americans, fuelled by government propaganda became worried that Marxist ideology would infiltrate the country, turning America into a socialist hellscape. In order to escape the looming doomsday prophesized by the McCarthy’s, and the propaganda media of the time, drastic measures were taken to censor anything that the public thought could be sympathetic toward the communist agenda.
Known communists were arrested under false pretenses, literature deemed to be anti-democratic was banned, and even people like Lucille Ball, star of “I Love Lucy,” was black balled from show business for a period of time because her grandfather had convinced her to register as a communist in her youth.
We now look back at those times of misguided fear with a sense of shame, knowing that in our effort to thwart “Big Brother” we became him. We strayed away from the promises of the first amendment for a false sense of security, forgetting the words spoken by Benjamin Franklin centuries ago- “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”
Yet today, men ignorant of history are intent on repeating its folly, chastising the genius for poking at the insecurities of society in an effort to see the world remain in the purgatory of stagnation, forfeiting progress for pseudo security.
So let them tell their anecdotes about the virtues of censorship to the children of the Arab Spring who are using social networks to oust the their corrupt governments as we speak. Let them run a black pen over the words of the revolutionaries risking their livelihoods to bring about freedom of speech in China. Let them block the likes of Julian Assange and Wikileaks shedding light on the dark practices of the nation that claims to be ‘a beacon of light to the rest of the world.’ For surely they’d censor the world with the same guillotine voice that came down upon the heads of Luther, Locke, and Jefferson.
These much-to-do-about-nothing blame the internet for the corruption of our nation’s youth, and spit their rhetorical catchphrases at PTA conferences saying, “Think of our children, and what kind of example we’re setting for them.” They blame the new found media for freedom for the corruption of a generation, but take little time to realize that at the end of the day they are still the parents of that generation. Their inability to raise their children to their expectations reflects upon their own inabilities to raise their children, and not the horrors of free and unlimited information. They complain about the immorality and filth of the internet while putting their children in front of a screen for five hours a day in substitution for real parenting.
As the kids of a new generation read textbooks and are taught to look disparagingly at the Dark Ages and a millennium without the freedom of public thought and speech, their mothers and fathers attempt to bring us back to a world where free thinkers are reviled as blashpemers, and sanction the only truly free source of information still allotted to us. We are living in the time of a new great enlightenment, and as history has taught us there will always be those opposed to progress. However, it is our responsibility as a society to persevere and not let the folly of our fathers persist into the new millennium.