Laxatives Are Easy

Maybe those Long Island teens had the right idea after all. The Net has been sizzling since the weekend because of foul-fingered bloggers and that foul-mouthed shock jock, Imus... or perhaps what these latter folk require is something for tightening their already loose brain cells, fingers, and mouths.

Actually, I am against censorship in principle, but I have nothing against self-control on a personal level. There ought to be some reasonable way of differentiating between freedom of expression and diarrhea of the mouth, though clearly those who pride themselves on being "shock jocks" have lost sight of that difference, if they ever knew. I do think the first ones did; how else does one know how to step over a line except by actually knowing where that line is? Of course, as so many childhood games once taught us, crossing back and forth over lines drawn in dirt and sand quickly leads to the blurring, obscuring, and ultimate erasing of said lines.

In the case of Kathy Sierra, death threats are serious business, like yelling fire in a theater or bomb on a plane. About such things there really is little or no room for humor. In the case of Don Imus and the Rutgers Women's basketball team, generations-long racism leaves little or no room for humor as well. I find it particularly disturbing that women are the targets in both these instances, though to be fair, a man thus treated would simply be told to suck it up, get even instead of mad, etc.

The truth of the matter is that the kinds of things that are happening and making the news these days are far too reminiscent of darker times in American history. Though we are admittedly a young country, we are no longer the youngest, nor are we eligible for nursery status any longer. We don't have excuses for failing to learn from our past, and the explanations aren't pretty. Too many of our people of all ages are either polarized or apathetic, neither of which is healthy or helpful. If we can't hear and won't listen to each other because our ipods are up too loud and our monitors are so large that they obscure our view of anything but the entertainment before us, then we as a nation are lost to our own inventions.