Great Firewall of China

For my English project. Which I have yet to do adequate research for but what the heck. Okay this is harder than I thought...

Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of press, freedom to assemble in peaceful protest. Our nation was founded on the principle of freedom. Yet, on the other side of the world, a mere ocean away, there exists a government that infringes on our inalienable rights, our natural rights, our freedoms as a human race. Not only is this government restricting their own people's rights, but at the same time they are expanding their control over the eastern part of Asia, slowly engulfing the surrounding nations and drawing them into their censoring ways. With this nation dominating the eastern hemisphere, how long will it be before their influence spreads to our land of the free?

This superpower rivaling that of our own is none other than China. China has argued that other countries also censor their internet, but it is a fact that no other country regulates the information as strictly as China does. Being a country run mostly by telecommunications and tangles of wires, China has to take extra precautions not to let the wrong kind of information slip out or in. Such information would be include porn, violence, torture, evil, brain wash, police brutality, democracy, and surprisingly, human rights.

Ironically, this censorship of media is already present in our nation. Remember when you were doing research in the school library for some project? Remember when you clicked on a link related to your research and you're met with this gray page with "Access Denied" in big, fat, communist-red letters printed over the screen? Internet censorship has already reached our country of freedom, though it hasn't consumed the entire nation. We need to stop internet censorship in China before its influence decimates the rest of our liberties.

The internet censure in China would not only have effects on our personal life and entertainment, but also our country's economy. Because sieving through the information in China takes significantly longer than it would not, there would be less international collaboration between countries, therefore effectively and drastically impeding the development of the human race all together. A lack of growth would cripple our nation's already deteriorating economy. Of course we may think that slower internet speeds would only be a minor setback in our grand scheme of Change and Hope, but a bigger cause is the shortage of adequately informed individuals whom would eventually go on leading our future countries and working with us on business trips. The citizens of China are blinded from the changes going on in the world around them as well as the reforms and unfortunate events within their very own community. What China is raising are politically, socially, and intellectually oblivious citizens, whom we have to collaborate with in the future in order to make our economic comeback. Their unawareness of what's going on globally will negatively affect the evolution of the human race.

However, what's important are not the effects of censorship on us, but the connotation that censorship is ethically wrong, for it infringes on our human right of freedom of speech and our freedom to express ourselves. As the Declaration of Human Rights states in article nineteen, everyone has the right to freedom and expression, the right to hold opinions without reference, and the right to receive and impart information and ideas through any media, regardless of frontiers. Also stated in article twenty-seven is that everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and the right to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. It's obvious that the communist government is in direct violation of those two articles by censoring the internet to suit their cause. China censoring the information that the citizens are trying to express about the injustice of the government is against the human rights that the United Nations set, which China is a part of.

Who knows where this corrupted notion could lead to. The real threat behind internet censorship is that there's no line that one could draw. What they can limit is illimitable.

SAT

Hey, I'm back, not like anyone actually reads this. It's October and the buzz around my school has been nothing but three letters. S. A. T. Not only is there SAT I but also SAT II and PSAT, which happened to show up on today's crossword in the newspaper. Everything has been centered around the SAT which supposedly determines how well you can answer questions that, from my point of view, are bias towards those whose mother language is English. Yes I'm probably making a huge deal out of this but it's not like anyone can see from my point of view anyways.

Being brought up in my overly competitive school I'm surrounded by a modest mob of frantic test-takers whom know nothing about life other than how to bubble in answers and study. Sorry I can't be like every other person who can put up with spending four hours stuck in a classroom doing nothing but taking tests and absorbing lectures five days a week and some even more. Sorry I despise all of you for being better than me because I can't motivate myself to study in a midst of overachievers that can make me feel inferior in every way. Sorry I'm a good-for-nothing who can't possibly bring myself to be assessed on how well I can read passages or how well I can memorize a thousand-word-long list of vocabulary or how well I can write a monotonous, well-structured essay that's the equivalent of a straight jacket.

But most of all, I'm sorry I can't be as high and mighty as all of you people with 2400s out there and feel good about myself for being worse. Of course you'd never understand what it feels like to be ostracized by your group of friends who all went to the same SAT prep classes and all achieved significantly high scores. What's even worse is they don't even know it. They don't know how I feel, they don't know how I could possibly do worse than they did, they don't know what it's like to be academically inferior to them in every way possible in a school that revolves around grades, they don't know and they probably will never know how I feel. Seriously? Oh no you got a B+ on the most recent test-- of course that's so much worse than my D+. You only have a 4.0 GPA? What a shame it can't be a 5.0.

But I'm getting side-tracked. Your SAT scores are so nonchalantly achieved that if I were to ask you how to study I'd probably be waved off with something along the lines of "Oh you don't know? Well it's kind of common sense" or "I don't know how to explain it, I just kind of know." You're not helping. "Oh it's okay there's still time for improvement," well guess what, it's kind of hard to improve when you don't know how and no one around you can possibly understand what it's like to not get something.

I hate, I loathe, I despise, I am so ineffably outraged at our country's testing system. It doesn't measure how much you know about a subject, It doesn't measure your abilities to process information, what it does assess is how well you can study before a test, how much money you spend on tutors and classes, basically how well you can take a test. There's no knowledge needed to take any multiple choice test, and when you don't know you can just guess and have a 1/4 or 1/5 chance of getting it right. Sure free response tests are harder and take longer to grade and require more money to hire people to grade them but at least they're more accurate. Instead of thinking of a student's knowledge they're thinking of the most efficient way to soothe their own problems and hardships at the cost of the student. And we have no choice but to conform and adapt to their way of assessment or else we're sure to fail.

Well guess what all you bubble machines with a 5.0 GPA on your report card, a 2400 on your SAT, a 800 on your five different SAT II subject tests, and a 5 on every single one of your AP tests. I have a life. I have a social life. I have friends who actually care about how I feel. I have knowledge of subjects that aren't mandated by college board. I have a skill set that will get me further than sitting in a cubicle. I actually do sports (huh what is that?). And guess what? I'm not sorry for writing this.