It is the first of twenty-seven liberties that have shaped our country over the years:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

We have taken our right to freedom of speech and run with it, mangling and twisting it around to suit our needs and turning it into an almost unrecognizable mess. This perhaps is our greatest freedom: The First Amendment. Whether it’s the show we’re watching, the book we’re reading, or what we’re tweeting about, we are exercising our right to read and say what we please; however, it has not been surprisingly been abused. Enter SOPA, a bill proposed by Congress to censor inappropriate content on the internet.

While the bill’s basic intentions are good, it’s nowhere near practical nor would it ever get the votes to pass. What happens when you take down one piracy site? A hundred will pop up in its place. The internet is so vast that there is no way that it could effectively be monitored. As a journalist, things like this worry and upset me. Once you start censoring things like the internet, who says the government can’t start to censor what we write? Or say? Or watch? Or read? Or… Well, you get the idea.

There is one thing that gets me. However, a good majority of people who seem to be having an aneurysm over this have never really cared about what the government has been doing for the past year or five years. But when there is a threat of getting their Facebook or blog censored, there is mass hysteria. People seem to not care much about their First Amendment rights until someone is trying to take them away.

The best way to combat this is simply to censor yourself before the government has to do it for you. Dropping the f-bomb every other word probably isn’t necessary when writing that Facebook status or composing that tweet. Just because you have the right to be disgustingly obscene doesn’t mean you should be. Showing a little bit of class and deciding to not post those provocative pictures or using a thesaurus when we talk online is a pretty easy solution to this problem. Here’s the bottom line: Be informed and use your First Amendment rights to protest your government who is on the fast track to taking them away.