Caution: You Are About to Enter an Unfiltered Zone

People:
Trouble, oh we got trouble,
Right here in Hamburg Townhip!
With a capital "T"
That comes right before "U"
And that stands for Unfiltered.
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in Hamburg Township,
Right here!
Gotta figger out a way
To keep the young ones moral after school!
Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble...

My apologies to Meredith Willson, but that's what we've got folks. Trouble in Hamburg Township. We thought we were safe, but unbeknownst to us, we were "unfiltered."

All this time, the Internet, with a capital "I," has been flowing unfiltered into our library. And people have been allowed to go into the library and look at this unfiltered material. For years.

Not that it's been a real problem. Only once has a Hamburg librarian caught a patron doing something "inappropriate" at a library computer. The librarian who saw him apparently fondling himself called police, who whisked the man away.

But once was one too many times for the vigilantees on the Hamburg Board of Trustees, which decided to warn the public that the Internet is "unfiltered" at the library.

Never mind that the trustees do not control the library -- it has its own elected board and its own millage, although the township owns the building and the land on which the library sits.

Never mind that the library already has a policy in place for dealing with such situations and already has restrictions on the use of its computers.

Never mind that the unfiltered Internet that is spewing out dangerous ideas is also flowing unfiltered into thousands of homes in Hamburg Township, thanks to the cable franchise approved by the same Hamburg Board of Trustees.

The trustees, led by Trustee Pat Hohl, wasted who knows how much public money putting up this 20 square foot sign warning the public about the "unfiltered" Internet. According to the Livingston Community News, the trustees were going to say it was "unresticted," until they found out from the library board that there are 13 restrictions on Internet use.

So they went with "unfiltered," which makes it sound like a health hazard, until you get to the part about "objectionable material" possibly being visible to the general public.

So who defines what is "objectional material" -- Hohl and the rest of the trustees? And what exactly are their standards for determining that? They probably would find anything from Moveon.org or John Edwards' campaign "objectionable."

And once the trustees start finding things "objectionable" on the Internet, who says they'll stop there? What's next -- signs warning the public about "objectionable" material in the library's music collection, its newspapers, its books? I'll bet Hohl would find lots of "objectionable" material in The New York Times.

As Peg Eibler, library board vice president, put it, "To me, what they're doing is the same as book burning. It's book burning with a different media."

Having our ideas unfiltered, either by Hohl or anyone else, happens to be one of the rights guaranteed to us Americans by the Bill of Rights to our Constitution. And if you don't have a copy of the Bill of Rights, here's a link -- unfiltered -- to a copy on the Internet.