I was talking with fellow astrologer, tarot reader, and teacher Christopher Marmolejo the other day and they asked me a question: Have you ever been censored in your speech?

Actually, since they asked me that question, I’ve been thinking it over a lot.

I’m getting glasses this year. I haven’t gotten new glasses for about ten years now but I got vision insurance and went to the optometrist and went to the glasses store. Inside, I found a pair of round oval glasses I really liked. But when I went to pay, the sales associate was busy and that gave me the chance to look for the same frames on eyebuydirect.

But my vision is really bad. That means that my lenses are really expensive because I have to get the high index instead of polycarbonate. That means that, when I purchase eyeglasses for myself, I need some real actual information about the glasses that I am buying.

But guess what? No matter what I googled, I could find no information about what material any glasses retailer uses to make their lenses. All I could find was pages upon pages of ads about different glasses retailers and cryptic terms about Memorial day deals.

This is the thing. We’re told that we live in an information age and that we have all of this information at our fingertips. Is that real? I think that we have a lot of ads at our fingertips but we can’t find any information at all, not even when we’re doing something that our society is completely set up to enable: make a purchase.

Don’t you think that this is a type of censorship?

Censorship isn’t just about what we’re able to say. Censorship is also about what we are able to learn.

Have you ever been censored in not just your speech but in your thinking?

Now, I’m not expecting some unpaid blogger to sit down and make an extensive list about what material different glasses manufacturers use for me. This isn’t that deep. But getting pages upon pages of ads that are completely unrelated to my google prompt is a little much. It makes you think about how many times you’ve tried to look for real information but only find pages upon pages of advertisements.

Online censorship is easier to track with censorship happening in the real world. How many of us who grew up in predominantly white towns call the claustrophobic and paranoid mentality that we grew up in (too much religion, too little reality) a form of censorship?

Censorship is about what you’re allowed to learn, about who you’re allowed to connect with and about what you’re willing to believe.

I think that the church uses a lot of censorship, not just about what you’re allowed to say but what you’re allowed to think or even believe. That’s the root of censorship. Prohibiting people from free speech is just the surface layer of it all. Censorship controls what you’re willing to question, the whole basis of your curiosity, and what you’re even interested in.

Censorship is about a lack of curiosity. People aren’t interested in you. They exclude you. It’s not just about siloing speech but about active neglect. If no one asks you the questions that you need to be asked in order to truly think, then you wilt a little. You have to struggle to achieve the emotional maturity that you need to find connections between people and ideas and to think. That’s a form of abandonment and neglect.

Censorship is a lack of culture, a lack of continuity. A lot of care.

I think that this is embedded very deep in a lot of the spaces that we might find ourselves in when we live in the United States. And, yes, censorship at the level of literally prohibiting certain forms of speech is still going strong. That’s also there. But it just goes deeper. There’s more going on here.