Cheap Meth? Cheap Guns?

Sort of borrowed the title here from Nicholas Kristof's recent column Cheap Meth! Cheap Guns! Click here. about China.

It's quite catchy.

The notable quote in Kristof's article comes when he observes, "Tens of thousands of censors delete references to human rights, but they ignore countless Chinese Web sites peddling drugs, guns or prostitutes."

How many times do we pause long enough to contemplate the ironies of our lives? The Chinese government is actually getting it right here, if you're into communism. Suppression of intellectual freedom has long been proven to be an expedient in the takeover of common sense and justice. Do I need to even mention Hitler?

Keeping people ignorant, perpetuating myths and stereotypes, spreading misinformation that is tempting and just on the edge of believable...surely these things couldn't occur in the year 2013, the age of technology and transparency because if you can catch something on tape, well, that makes it hard to rewrite history, no?

Yet we see the paradox of democracy and technology. The more we are able to discover and share any type of new information as well as archived information that was previously only available to a select, elite group, and the more we are able to create our own histories (Rodney King), the more we seem to rely on tired arguments that have been recycled with 2013 terminology and myths.

It should be easier than ever to be a genius or, at least more practically, semi-knowledgeable.

And there certainly are some people who feel that they are more intelligent mostly because of the Internet. WebMD diagnoses, access to thousands of newspapers, Google scholar, celebrities who Tweet.

And also the proliferation of millions of web sites that are blogs like this one, contributing one voice to cyberspace (that I'm not sure you can argue actually exists), and other web sites that are more malicious and malevolent. We can pay people to do our thinking for us.

Is there a difference between this and China? Sure, and it's one that Aldous Huxley already observed. The difference is that we are willingly allowing our freedoms to be usurped by technology while most of the Chinese don't have a choice. We want cheap guns but no massacres. We want the freedom to consume the substances of our choice but not have to pay for rehabilitation or other health consequences. We want freedom, but there is a burden involved in that as well: the burden of being wise and careful, unswayed by rhetoric, always pointing toward King's arc of justice.

I think censorship is a mixed bag in America. When we have children, people generally feel pretty protective, monitoring what their children view, play with, who watches them. But if we start to discuss censoring the making of violent movies, people cry a foul against the First Amendment. Same with trying to promote gun safety (notice the difference in connotation between that term and "gun control"). People don't want the government to be able to control what you can view, listen to, produce, or shoot. But history has proven that we need protection from ourselves, particularly in a capitalistic society. We've seen this from the likes of Upton Sinclair, Susan B. Anthony, and Bob Woodward. When left to our own devices, we can do some pretty regrettable things to our fellow mankind, particularly in the name of money. It's one of the ultimate ironies of the universe.

Now, unlike what some might argue, our government is not communist. It does not delete web sites which publish views contrary to its own (not that there is only one of those anyway). But do we sometimes do things backwards around here? Do we sometimes get it wrong, do the complete opposite of what we should do?

Do we ever end up sounding like the catch phrase of obvious incongruity as Kristof wrote above?