January 18 - On Censorship

I have been loosely inspired by the SOPA/PIPA debates to write this piece.  It's not strictly relate to piracy, but it is related to censorship.  For information on the legislation:

https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/One-Page-SOPA_0.pdf

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html

http://dyn.com/sopa-breaking-dns-parasite-stop-online-piracy/

https://www.eff.org/free-speech-weak-link

January is by nature a cold month.  Perhaps, as I am a North-easterner, I am biased in this thinking; January is a winter moth where I come from.  Perhaps my friends in the southern hemisphere meet the warmest people in the first month of the year.  I do not.  Unfailingly, the people of January (which is not to say those born in January, just the ones that inhabit it in my sphere of experience) are cold people.  January marks midterms for some.  It marks the beginning of a new year, the first steps of a new kind of humanity into a new age.  It marks bad roads and bad traffic and bad news.  Understandably, the people of January are a humorless bunch.

It was in one of these cold January months, when I was in sixth grade, that I first experienced censorship. I was, for a time, an editor of my middle school's literary magazine (or the seldom updated website with pretensions of being a literary magazine), and it was there that I first heard the words "Yes, it was good; but we had to edit it for its content."  If memory serves the piece in question was one called Loneliness.  I no longer have the text, but I remember it was a seventh grader's ode to a lonely existence.  I never once questioned the veracity of this piece.  Even at a young age, I had absorbed the fact that rich kids are very good at hiding their problems.  After all, I was very good at looking like a happy kid; why shouldn't she be the same?  But there was something about this piece that the esteemed, somewhat senile, PhD in charge of the magazine deemed "too depressing".  As it turned out, she had taken this seventh grader aside and told her that the piece, while beautifully written, would have to be edited if she wanted it in the magazine.  It was too depressing to be read by the rest of the student body.

Wether this esteemed and somewhat senile PhD genuinely believed that the piece needed censoring for the benefit of the rest of the student body or wether she simply needed it edited for herself (as I suspect was really the case), the fact remains that this is what that seventh grader wanted to present to the student body.  This memory has stayed with me.  The idea that a piece might need editing for content has stayed with me.  The notion that writing should be dumbed down for the audience has stayed with me.  And so too has the conviction that this is wrong stayed with me.  I firmly believe that writing should not be edited for content.  We all have our own voice; and that voice, if we so choose, should be heard as we intend it to.