Fahrenheit 451: Censorship

            Censorship is a major theme in Fahrenheit 451. Censorship is a major issue in our lives today, and Bradbury predicted when he wrote the novel it would be in the future also. In the novel the censorship is done by the firemen. They control what the people of the United States can read and do. They are not allowed to read any books, because they are made up stories that will make you different than all of the other people who do not read the book. Although deciding what the population can or cannot read makes them easier to control, you cannot tell people what to do without having someone revolt. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing" (Bradbury 51). People are always curious, and someone will always do what they are told not to. It is just human nature to be curious, and having a punishment for that would be even harder to decide on in our time. Cutting people off from something they can learn and prosper from is like stopping them from discovering something great. They could invent or discover something that could solve world problems like global warming, cancer, and other diseases or shortages. This issue that Bradbury predicted would happen in the future is prevalent now. We have censorship problems about whether the government should censor the internet and what and who can see what. The public gets extremely upset about that issue, and if it got to the point that Bradbury wrote about I cannot imagine what people would do. Thankfully the chances of that happening are extremely unlikely. Books might not be the thing being censored, but it is just one example of what could happen.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Print.