send me on my way

Today I was watching Matilda and there was this one scene in the movie where Ms. Honey's class has to hide almost everything in the classroom from the vile principal, Ms. Trunchbull. The students pulled down sheets to cover up all the art projects hanging on the walls, anything colorful, or anything that could be of sentimental value. The classroom transformed from a fun learning environment into a dreary, colorless, lifeless room. When Ms. Trunchbull came in the classroom she made it clear to the students that she knew/saw everything and whatever she said what the final word...basically if she said up was down, then up was, in fact, down. Ms. Trunchbull reminded me of Big Brother from the book 1984 by George Orwell. In this book, Big Brother tells the people what to believe and how they should lives their lives. It was interesting to see this figure in another context (other than cultural revolution/communism) and think about how lucky we are to have all the privilages we do...but what about the controversy over the moment of silence in advisory and its voilation of the first ammendment...though not as extreme as the customs that Ms. Trunchbull enforces, maybe our school isn't so different from hers after all?

Censorship

Today in class we discussed the issue of how common censorship is in the world around us, and how unaware people are of the history that is being erased right before their eyes.

Most of this censorship is issued by the government (FCC). Radio is very censored because in many situations, parents don't have control over what their child listens to because the radio is so easily accessible. If radio stations are blasted for having vulgar dialogue, then they lose listeners...causing the station to lose advertiseres, which can only result in one thing...failure. The only way to keep the station going would be to keep it clean and acceptable for all ages (an ex. of censorship for big money). For example, Howard Stern, who had so many issues with the FCC on public radio that his only outlet was Sirus Satellite Radio (TM). Eminem's hit, "The Real Slim Shady" was prohibited from various radio stations because of the song's crude content.

Censorship isn't just in the media,it's also in history...or what we are told to believe history is. The Chinese government is a huge offender of censorship. The Chinese gov't is making a dyre effort to whitewash their history...with the assistance of such powerful search engines as Google (TM). For example, if you google "Tiananmen Square" in China, nothing pops up. If you google the same thing in the U.S., loads of information on the subject pops up. I find it strange that Google (TM), with all it's power, is not even reaching its full potential throughout the world.

Censorship is even at our school. Take the mass blocking of gaming websites, YouTube, etc. No matter whether you see it or not, censorship surrounds everyone because the world is forever under the influence of giants.