I’m worried about you. I know that you all couldn’t wait to grow up and become bankers and tradesmen. But then, you started subscribing to this newspaper, full of depressing stories about the state of the economy and the state of the real estate market – not to mention the large advertisements, offering vast swatches of distressed this and that, up for auction.

There’s a danger that if you keep reading, you’ll give up your careers and become newspaper columnists – a sad, sad way to crush your dreams.

I proposed a benign form of censorship as a solution. I wrote a column suggesting a method by which you could call me on the phone, and for a fee, I could read you my inspiring, uplifting column, and then you wouldn’t run the risk of reading the rest of the newspaper.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. The editor censored the column. He wants you to keep reading.

That’s the problem with censorship. You like it when it stomps on what you don’t like, but the environment becomes such that the censorship monster can turn on you and shoot down what you do like.

That’s the tricky business before the U.S. District Court in Boston, where the American Civil Liberties Union and assorted hangers-on are challenging a Massachusetts law that criminalizes online communication that is “harmful to minors.”

The legislative intent is clear enough – assuming the Massachusetts legislators are not planning blanket censorship to facilitate an overthrow of the Commonwealth and the establishment of some sort of dictatorship that makes liquor so expensive that you want to drive to New Hampshire. Oh. Never mind. We have that already.

No, to be sure, the freewheeling accessibility of the Internet is prime territory for sexual predators and obscenity peddlers targeting the young and impressionable and vulnerable. But, is the legislation sufficiently specific about its intentions?

Broad Brush

The suspicion is that what is “harmful” to minors is murky and imprecise and runs the risk of applying to sex education films in your child’s “heath” class in middle school.

Across the country, the uneasy coalition of folks lined up to oppose this kind of legislation includes “progressives,” who are quick to tell you that we must sacrifice “for the sake of the children.” But, censorship makes them uneasy, in a civil liberties, First Amendment kind of way.

Legislation similar to the Massachusetts version was struck down by a federal appeals court in Oregon this year, as Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and even the Association of American Booksellers lined up in opposition.

The booksellers? They suggested, and the court agreed, that the law broadly interpreted could even apply to selling Judy Blume books and other sophisticated fiction marketed to young girls.

While the Internet technology may be a fresh approach to filling young brains with violence or sexual content, the issue is certainly not new, nor is the complexity of dealing with it much different than it has been for decades.

The movie-rating system went through its decades of agony, attempting to fine-tune exactly how smoke-filled, violent and sexy a film might be before it achieved something other than the dreaded “X,” or perhaps “R,” or “PG.”

Again the civil liberties types were unhappy with the process and the product.

As Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote at the time of the movie-rating frenzy: “Persuading youngsters of the virtue of non-violence and the vice of violence is more challenging than simply censoring violent images.” And, he noted, persuasion is more consistent with our “Bill of Rights” than outright censorship.

We imagine sex and violence and predation to offer up precision as a regulatory target, but both the remedy and enemy remain elusive.

David Solomon, chief of the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau from 1999 to 2005, explained the frustration in an essay in Broadcasting and Cable magazine.

“Does ‘Schindler’s List’ qualify as excessively violent and thus patently offensive? How about ‘Saving Private Ryan?’ ‘The Three Stooges?’ ‘Road Runner?’ A nightly-news report on the Iraq war? A fight in a hockey game? Who knows?”

Censorship, much like taxation, seems much more appropriate when applied to someone else. That’s a problem, isn’t it?