Allen Ginsberg's Howl

Howl is a poem that epitomizes the beat generation. Ginsberg was heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac's On The Road. We tend to think of ourselves as an enlightened culture, free from excessive censorship, but when poem's like Howl are not allowed to be shown for fear of heavy fines by government sanctioned agencies we are confronted with the truth. We are probably the most heavily "protected" first world country. We are protected by the moral value system of a group of very conservative whitebread Christian people who I don't believe represent the majority of our population but seem to have a voice that counts more than everyone else's. These, I believe are the same people who blame non-white people for urban poverty and crime and gay people for HIV. Most of us believe we've come a long way in the past few decades in our more mature perspectives on issues of humanity and our interactions with others of variety, but quite obviously we have a long way to go when radio stations can't even broadcast what should be revered as a classic poem, not to mention that we still live in a society in which many freedoms are denied to large parts of our population, the least of which is to be able to express ourselves in words and have others hear them.