Save the best for last

The most interesting, thought provoking part of this piece by Cory Doctorow comes at the very end.

Risk-taking behavior — including ill-advised social, sexual, and substance adventures — are characteristic of youth itself, so it's natural that anything that co-occurs with youth, like SF or TV or video games, will carry the blame for them. However, the frightened and easily offended are doing a better job than they ever have of collapsing the horizons of young people, denying them the pleasures of gathering in public or online for fear of meteor-strike-rare lurid pedophile bogeymen, or on the pretense of fighting gangs or school shootings or some other tabloid horror. Literature may be the last escape available to young people today. It's an honor to be writing for them.

I wholeheartedly agree with just about everything he says there. When we're young we learn by doing and making mistakes. How many times do we fall before we learn to walk properly? We have to be prepared to be hurt, sometimes badly, to learn new things and to become new people, to fulfill our potential.

And yes, there are certainly people out there who are trying very hard to keep our young people from spreading their wings, or even noticing that they have wings.