During my walk, I saw a honeybee nursing on Bee balm. Queen Anne’s lace spread her doilies over the grass. Milk weed towered with shell like pods, soon to erupt in silk. Corn flowers have sopped up a bit of sky in their petals. Clover blossoms purple. Brown-eyed Susans chatter. A goldfinch bobs along ahead of me. I’ve watched the corn grow from bare fields so tall I feel tiny walking next to it. The tassels are like church spires, the ears like women’s purses.
Then one day I hear a roar as the road commissioner drops his bat wing brush hog. He does a fine job lopping off the grass and flowers. Soon the combine will sound like a monster chewing the corn stalks, refining the cobs to gold kernels that don’t pay much on the commodities market.
There’s a machine dropping its batwing cutter, working its way around the world, chopping people’s freedoms to say what they think, in the name of safety and rules about hate speech and misinformation. Elon Musk and X have been kicked out of Brazil. The EU has threatened X with fines if Musk livestreams a conversation with Donald Trump. Pavel Durov of Telegram has been arrested in France for not ratting out his clients. Mark Zuckerberg has admitted to censoring true stories because the federal
Do we want to cut the beauty and variety of human opinion in the name of safety? Who decides what’s misinformation?
I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.
