My hidden phobia

When most people describe their phobia or fear, it is common to hear people talk about their fear of heights or the occasional spider. Send me on a huge roller coaster and I will be delighted. Put a spider on my head and I won't even jump. However, there is one thing that will raise the hair on my arms.This item is a couch with a cover. Maybe it is the unknown piece of moldy food that lays hidden between the cushions, or the crazy texture of that old jean material cover. I do not know the exact reason as to why this strikes so much fear into me, but the fear is definitely apparent.

I think my fear began when I was about seven years old. For our Christmas celebration, my dad's side of the family decided to rent a cabin on an island in the middle of a lake somewhere in Minnesota. The outside of the cabin was very fun and exciting. One of my cousin's even brought a dog sled accompanied by her four huskies.  It was the best feeling in the world to ride on the ice, while pretending to be a professional sled dog owner. Although, the outside of the cabin offered lots of fun and amazing adventure, the inside was a different strory. There was a pretty good chance that no one had lived in the cabin for many decades. The floor inside the cabin and the floor of the woods ouside the cabin bore a very close resemblance to each other. The furniture in the cabin had also seen its better days, and every couch or chair had a covering on it. Even my childhood curiosity didn't dare to have a peak at what lay underneath those couch covers. It was here on this family vacation where my phobia of couch covers began.

Although I have not been to another old cabin in the middle of a lake, my family has visited a few cabins since. I am not sure why, but the common theme at every cabin I go to seems to be couch covers. As you might imagine, this is a very scary moment for me. I have decided that whenever I go to places like this, I will just try to avoid the couches altogether. This usually means I end up sitting on the floor, but this is okay by me. My family finds it a bit odd, but I just tell them it is more comfortable being close to the ground. Not very many people knew about my fear of couch covers, but I guess you could say that now my secret phobia is uncovered. No pun intended!

Are There Limitis To Free Speech Blog

Every day the press releases information and secrets that citizens of the U.S. soak up can't seem to get enough of.  Many of these secrets are about politicians or celebrities and often published for means of entertainment only. I don't think that it is necessary information to know about every detail of Kim Kardashian's life. Although most information and secrets are ones like these that don't jeapordize our nations security, I think that some secrets are much better kept. In the case of WikiLeaks, most of the information they release to the public is very classified information. Some may say that as citizens of the United States we have the right to know this information. I think that this is true to some extent. For example, if the government knew we were going to be attacked by another countries nuclear weapon, this information must be shared with the rest of the country. In other words if the information directly affects our safety we should know about it. There are some cases where information that is meant to be classified is better off not being shared. A moment in our countries history where classified information should not have been shared was during World War II. Gabriel Schoenfeld brought up this point in his article Can U.S. Bring Assange to Justice?  The press announced that the U.S. may have broken Japanese naval codes. Thankfully the Japanese did not notice the newspapers and did not alter their codes. If the Japanese had noticed the newspaper, the course of the war could have been drastically different. This information was also not necessary for everyone in the U.S. to know and could have affected our national security.

According to Julian Assange, the man in charge of WikiLeaks, they do filter through and carefully choose which pieces of classified information they are going to release. Even though this may be true, most of this information is not directly related to the safety of U.S. citizens; therefore if it is meant to be classified it should probably stay classified. In some ways Assange did break the Espionage Act of 1917, because he knew by releasing the information that it had the potential to harm the U.S. In other ways he may have been trying to exercise and be an activist for free speech, which is a good thing. He is riding on a very fine line, making it understandable why it is so difficult for the Judges in his trial to come to a verdict. If Assange is accused of breaking the law, many could say that it goes against our free speech amendment. If Assange isn't accused then people who actually do leak information with the purpose of injuring the U.S. could argue that what Assange did is no different. You can't exactly pick and choose who you want to convict based on the degree of their intentions to injure the U.S.

I think that the best idea would be to not convict Assange as long as he agrees to discontinue WikiLeaks. I think that in the end this would please people on both sides of the argument.