PEARLS FELINES TOILETS AND CENSORSHIP

We know what happens when governments ban words, books and activities.

The words and books will be said and read.

The activities will be enacted.

In the older days of television, the words toilet (the actual word was W.C. meaning water closet) and pregnant were banned, but neither toilets nor pregnancies vanished.

Penis.

Ass.

These can now be said on AM radio and on the TV.

Vagina.

WATCH OUT!

This is considered a dirty and unmentionable word, as students at John Jay High School found out in an open mic session.

Three female students were reading from Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues".

Here is where the word vagina occurred:

"My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women's army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country."

At my high school we didn't even have a school newspaper.

Some students (one whose parent was a teacher at the high school), stole mimeograph machines and printed their version of (in this case) an underground newspaper.

Words are weapons and, as Florence Becker Lennon once told me, "Every word was once a pearl."

Ban words and you ban pearls.

And thought.

Shakespeare would not have been able to fashion all of his wonderful puns and poetic writing without the freedom to use all of those pearls...

Whenever, whatever and wherever he chose.

School officials at John Jay High School are a bunch of felines (I won't write vaginas or pussies).

IT'S THE OIL STUPID!