As a guy who cries entirely too often, I find the world to be an overly sensitive place. “Anthony!” people cry, “how dare you not think of the children?!” I find “the children” to be too often an excuse for censorship of ideals that don’t conform to ours. “Childhood innocence” is a veiled mask for ignorance. The people who perpetrate these ideals are encouraging people to stay ignorant. Ignorance is the enemy of a healthy society. By encouraging censorship and the removal of ideas that we don’t like, society is putting us in a box and we are letting it do so. The world is a dark, scary place, and hiding from it will only keep us from living.

Society is telling us to run away from things we don’t like. Get offended! Get mad! Be disgusted! That means you have a soul, and an opinion. Even if you feel every negative emotion in the world about something, that doesn’t mean it’s not okay for that thing to exist.

I despise everything about MTV, everything. There is nothing on that channel that I find resembles anything close to intelligible or thoughtful content. But do I believe that the channel itself should not exist? Of course not. It deserves to exist, because people want to watch it.

One of the best things about this country, the United of States of America, is that we have the First Amendment. It allows me to speak my mind and say almost anything I want. And it allows you to have that same right. If I have the most awful opinion in the word, I’m allowed to. Does it mean I should? Absolutely not, but the freedom that lets me is so incredibly important to what makes the US a special place. Get offended, but never keep me from offending you in the first place.