Censorship, Lennon, and Rap

FUCK CENSORSHIP.
That’s right, FUCK CENSORSHIP!
There is nothing dangerous about an idea. There is nothing evil about a word. Censorship is a weapon of tyranny, and its only goal is ignorance. If we truly seek to enlighten, then no word, thought, or phrase can be forbidden us.
People speak fearfully of iconoclasts because they ask questions about the essential nature of things. They insist in the most bothersome fashion on pointing out hypocrisies and injustices whenever they see them, regardless of how long they have been established as tradition. What people see in this, and what they are so spooked by, is the label of CHANGE blatantly hung round the curious heckler’s neck. It goes without saying that change can be good, but that doesn’t mean that most people still don’t hate the thought of it. “Why would you ask questions like that? Life is good enough and you want to compromise it all over that?” These people are forgetting a crucial fact, and that is that the truth thrives under scrutiny, always.
If our government had things going right and were really doing their jobs, there would be no question the American public couldn’t ask. So many things are senselessly labeled “top secret” by our government that we, as taxpayers and citizens, deserve to be aware of; of course, big brother takes it upon himself to “protect” us from the petty details of illegal wiretapping and water-board torture. “National Security” is the popular excuse of the time, and it’s a hell of a good one. God only knows what natural rights we’ll have confiscated next for the sake of “National Security.”

Just look at the lengths the government will go to, and for what? A goddamn Beatle, and Nixon thought he was a threat to “National Security.” Wiretapped, deported, and shot, all for writing “Give Peace a Chance.”
And you know what? It doesn’t surprise me one bit.
Let’s look at Tupac Shakur. At the time he was making music, members of the legislation were appalled at the content of his lyrics, and indeed with the entire genre of “gangsta rap.” The contents of these songs were unacceptable, they would insist, and disgusting. They treated gangsta rap as if it were the cause of black crime, when really it is the other way around. The cause of black crime is legislators fucking up and not fixing it, but since this is not as loud as rap music is in the public sphere these congressmen catch a lucky break in being able to point a finger at Tupac and say, “He is dangerous. His actions are propagating criminal activity, and his ideas are upsetting the social order of things.” Really, they are trying to distract us from the fact that “social order” has become a myth, and that they grow fat and affluent while would-be criminals struggle and starve.
Gangsta rap arose from a culture of economic survivors, processed through a hell of the US government’s design: the ghetto. I’m white myself, and I swear to God it’s a white man’s fault that a place as horrible as a ghetto even exists in America, and definitely a white man’s fault that all the ghettos are filled with black people. It’s a fucked up situation, and everybody knows it, but no one is willing to do anything about it. So what happened in the ghettos? People endured it.
The harsh realities and ugly truths that old white men find so offensive in rap music are the upshots of their societal neglect, coming back in the form of eloquent, angry poets to let them know, “This is what we have to live with, and it’s so bad that you can barely stand to even hear about it.”