A Fair Censor

           

The book the Lorax by Dr. Seuss was put on a list of banned books when it came out in the early 70’s. This was because the book supposedly anti business and anti capitalist and because this was during the red scare, anti-capitalist was pro-communist. Now I think this is against the constitutional right to freedom of speech. I think all censorship of a product of any kind whether it is TV, news, music, or book of any kind is against the 1^st amendment if another group that did not produce this item censors it.

In the Lorax they’re two big messages that you could take out of it. One leads to the belief that Dr Seuss is communist and the other leads you to the belief that Dr. Seuss cares about the environment and want to write a book about caring for nature.

The first belief that Dr Seuss is communist and anti-business and is conspiring to make all the children who read the book anti-business and make the new generation communist and have them rebel against the U.S. I feel like the only reason the group that was in charge of censorship reacted the way they did was because the U.S. still had troops in Vietnam and the Cold War was still in full swing.     I do still believe that although they acted out of fright, they still acted un-constitutionally

The second belief is that Dr Seuss cares about the environment and nature and that he wants to teach the children of the new generation that not caring for the environment will result in our world becoming a barren waste land. The reason I think this is his intention for the child readers is that I didn’t notice that it might be anti-business and pro-communist until I had been told the time period the book was written in and that the book was being considered as a book promoting traitorous behavior and also why it was being considered. I am 13 and probably wouldn’t have noticed that had nobody told me. This makes me think that if the book was written to be anti-business, it was written for adults who will notice and under stand that it was written as an anti-business piece. But if it was written for kids then it was written for the purpose of  learning to take care of the environment.