Mary Belk: First Amendment’s twisted around

Mary Belk
Columnist
Published: September 3, 2008

Have you ever said something without thinking? Blurted out words you wish you could take back? Acted without looking at the consequences?

This practice of acting too quickly can happen on a much larger scale. At the turn of the 20th century, the National Park Service was looking for a way to help drain some of the swamps in Everglade National Park. After considering some options, it was decided that planting melaleuca trees might solve the problem.

So melaleuca trees, with their black trunks and white branches, were shipped from Australia and planted in the Florida swamplands. This seemed to be a good solution for a number of years, but nowadays, park rangers regret that melaleuca trees were brought in without realizing the effect.

Today, the trees are taking over and nobody can figure out how to get rid of them. To make matters worse, the overabundance of melaleuca trees makes it impossible for much of the native flora and fauna to live there.

Here in Alabama we’ve had a similar situation develop with kudzu. This Asian vine was planted to help with erosion control. Now we’re frantically wondering how to curb the kudzu.

But out-of-control-plants are a mere inconvenience compared to another dilemma that our country’s facing—the computer revolution. It’s easy to see the good that’s come from computer technology.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment protecting freedom of the press, they never dreamed millions of Americans would someday have their own version of a press sitting on the desk in their study.

But that’s exactly what happened with the advent of the World Wide Web. With the Web revolution, a major legal quandary has emerged. Just what standards are individuals to be held to when it comes to what they “publish” on millions of home computers? Can the Web serve as the world’s soapbox? Can you make threats online? And is it legal to disclose something private about somebody? Fact is, putting words or pictures on your Web page is like publishing them in the newspaper.

And there’s another First Amendment freedom that has caused a dilemma — freedom of speech. Pornography is festering on the Internet like an out-of-control, inflamed boil. And pornographers are whining that to ban their filth would be depriving them of a constitutional right. They insist that parents can control every minute children surf the Net.

But keeping children off the Net negates one of its most positive aspects — using the Internet to do research. I’m reminded of the tenth-grade student who was doing a report on Louisa May Alcott. She typed “Little Women” into the computer, and she got little women all right, but it was child pornography.

Let’s face it. The avalanche caught us off guard. And as H.R. Haldeman so aptly put it, “Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s hard to get it back in.”

Mary Belk lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.