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The language choice

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was seen as shocking, but now, anything goes. -- Cole Porter's "Anything Goes"

Cosseted in your private little world, you can protect yourself from obscenity. Unfortunately, the cost is very high. The price for protection is isolation from the free-ranging intellectual ferment that only unfettered communication makes possible. Millions of people value the internet for what it can teach them. On the internet, they will not be able to escape from obscenity.

Individuals have to choose:

• you can isolate yourself from obscenity and remain ignorant of the intellectual hurly-burly on the internet, or
• you can let it roll off your back, relish the intellectual fervor that is out there, growing smarter, wiser, and better able to defend yourself.

People are learning to sort through what is important and what is not. They are learning to tell the difference. They are learning why. They are learning how to turn their backs to obscenity, how to laugh at it, and how to deflate it.

So far, thank goodness, those who take it upon themselves to save the rest of us from ourselves, have been ineffective. Not for want of trying. The House of Representatives recently voted to raise fines for broadcast indecency. The result is feeble, pathetic, ineffective, and dangerous. It won't protect people from indecency. As they are busily boarding up the front door, water is rushing in through every other window and door. Thay can't see that, facing the onrush of water, people are learning that they can swim: Spending time in the... ah... unfettered internet, people aren't the worse for getting all wet from it.

What is laughably sad is that while the representatives believe their stand for decency with the FCC will make a positive difference, when they are patching together a decaying fabric of censorship that perpetuates an Orwellian world that promotes fear, fosters prior censorship, and that wages war against intelligence, choice, and freedom.

In the mean time, media lawyers will get rich, broadcast executives will face artificial choices imposed by Congress and the FCC, societies for moral oversimplification will rock with predictions of dire consequences... and the real reasons for social problems will be overlooked.

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