Censorship

A reply to a note by poet, Sherman Alexie

Thank you Sherman Alexie for inviting a public discourse on March 28, 2025, around the vital concept of censorship at this crucial point in history. The world needs us to speak up and speak out. Artists shape politics and social purview; as a cyclical result, politics impact poets who are better served by being politically educated. As Percy Bysshe Shelley stated, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This is my support of your note and encouragement to you and all poets to write more about the dangers of censorship.

Censorship | by Sage Justice

Censorship
Prevents critical thinking for oneself and prohibits questioning authority.

Censorship
Predicts that history may repeat itself and promotes the type of propaganda that made the Holocaust possible.

Censorship
Murders watchdogs, eliminates a check and balances system, destroys democracy, and will eventually point in your direction too; for the “greater good.”

Censorship
Interferes with solution journalism, dialectical thinking, and educators. It doesn’t support a cause, it suppresses a people.

Censorship
Is a set of principles that when used against others,
can and will eventually be used against you too.

© Sage Justice 2020, and © March 28, 2025. This concept/theory/poem is original to Sage Justice. If you use it, please give credit and link to original work. Thank you.

Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie is one of three poets to have been featured in both A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker and A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker. The poem on Censorship by poet, Sage Justice was published on Substack as a response to the following note by Sherman Alexie.

Sage Justice is an award-winning poet, author, critically acclaimed performing artist, and intensely sincere, bold humanitarian activist.¹

Thank you for reading and sharing, Sage Words. Every coffee counts.

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Photo by Margot Hartford