George Could Not Have Imagined

I remember reading George Orwell’s book 1984 in about 1969. He wrote it in 1949. I found it fascinating. It took far more than 35 years for much of the book’s prognostications to come true. But here they come.

When the Clinton years ushered in “Hate Crimes”, I harkened back to the “Thought Police”. It is now considered, depending on what the killer was thinking, a worse crime for a white man to kill a black man than a black man to kill a black man. So the government can now decide which black man’s life is worth more. The worth of a person’s life now depends on their social-political membership. I bet George never saw that coming when he was penning his classic.

Just weeks ago, the City of New York instituted a program where all hidden and outdoor security cameras are now being linked into a sort of “Big Brother” system so that the government can perform continual surveillance on . . . .well, everyone. Yes, literally everyone who steps outside or walks through a building in the city is on camera. One can’t even pick their nose in Central Park anymore without the action being recorded in the main database at headquarters.

And now, the thing Mr. Orwell never saw coming is what has become known as social media; email, Facebook, Linked In, cell phones, Twitter and all the rest. What George Orwell saw as a real threat of our privacy by the government, has become the new threat to our privacy by our fellow man (or woman).

In the headlines today is a story about two teenage boys who, while at a party, found a girl passed out drunk, took off her clothes and took pictures of her and posted them on the internet. This is probably the ultimate invasion of privacy, short of rape. The new technological means at our disposal make privacy invasion amazingly easy. 

I have been learning a lot lately about the subject. Over this summer, I have had someone hacking into my computer and illegally obtaining my phone records in a malicious attempt to obtain information about me. This person even went so far as to delete items in my Facebook and email accounts. In my research, I have learned that this is a clear violation of the law. That makes me feel a little better to know that laws are in place to attempt to deter people from performing these pernicious acts. However, the means to accomplish their goals are so easy to obtain. Thirty years ago, this person would have had to break into my home and rifle through my private papers in my file drawer to dig up the same information that now just sits there in front of them on their computer. Since I know who this person is, I doubt that even they would have resorted to breaking and entering to violate my privacy. But it amounts to the same thing. 

Like so much in our new world, the ability of governments and citizens to illegally victimize others by invading their privacy through social madia technology is not going to go away. In fact, it will probably get worse before it gets better. So, it is up to us to work hard to make known to those that might be predisposed to do this sort of thing that using technology to violate a person’s privacy is a criminal act and, just as if they broke into your house, they can be prosecuted for breaking and entering your private domicile.

In the book, hope for a better future was aroused by a love affair between two people that were doing their best to buck the system. But, in the end, “Big Brother” won out and one of them betrayed the other by joining the "Party". My experience has made me ponder the possibility that we are heading in that direction. Pessimism is not one of my favorite emotions. So I am going to continue to search for hopeful signs that we are heading into a world of cautious optimism that new laws and avenues of information are enacted where the less trustworthy among us will think twice before violating the rights of others. As a matter of fact, I recently found out that most police departments and sheriffs departments have an IT investigation division and are usually very willing to help.

However, for now, a word of caution. Your password is just like your house key. If you get on someone else's computer and enter your password to check your email or Facebook or whatever, you have just left your house key with that person who so graciously let you borrow their computer. Better know and trust them really well. I thought I did. Turns out I was wrong.

What's Good About Us?

I just reread this. I think I wrote this more for me than anyone else. So it is not the riviting commentary that you are used to. Yuk, yuk. I promise to get back to irritating liberals by next weekend.

How does one measure goodness? Many will immediately answer that question by quoting a bible passage. The more metaphysical among us might take us off on a tangent of flowers and clouds. When a friend says “Oh, she’s a really good person.” I often think to myself, “In what way?”. Does she never lie, never make others sad, never cheat or steal? I doubt that. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any adult in the world that you could say that about. So what makes us decide that a person is good?

I have learned, in my waning years, that I can be rather naive when it comes to making a good assessment of people and whether or not I should feel comfortable enough to trust their friendship. I’m sure everyone has at least one, if not several stories where someone in their lives became a disappointment and even betrayed an unspoken trust. But to give humanity a little slack, I would guess that the vast majority of the time, that person unintentionally slipped up and caused pain to others.

Anyway, since this topic has been sorta rattling around in my brain lately, I decided to check out a few online forums on the subject. The results were quite enlightening to me. So I thought I’d share some here.

Cactus Says:

For me, a good person is someone who stops to question his/her deeds and on occasion is tormented by guilt for minor things such as hurting someone's feelings... you get the jist of it. A good person would have a certain set of principles and morals and strives to live by those principles and morals.

Shalott Says:

People go through stages in their lives and while some person or teenager may seem like a bad apple, that doesn't necessarily mean that person is bad through and through. and of course, there are some things we do that can never be undone or taken back.

Nikoli:

I think it's too easy to call someone "good" or "bad" and it misses the mark. The reasons we do what we do isn't because we are good or bad- it isn't because we have a strong or weak-willed character, it's because of the skills and tools we have learned, been taught, and been indoctrinated with. In this sense I agree that morality is a key factor, but it's not that simple, as there are more things involved: I don't know precisely all the functions which go into having the ability to make a good choice, but it'd be something like reasoning, discernment, knowledge of good and bad, judgment, but even "judgment" includes a lot of other smaller skills.

Petrarch Says:

After thinking about the question on this thread a little, I'm not at all comfortable with judging others as good or bad people. I think I do have my own idea of what an ideal good person would be, which I strive to live up to (and certainly fail at it in many ways), but I don't think I have some sort of ideal standard in my mind that other people have to live up to for me to deem them good (that is if we are mainly considering people who do not maliciously and willfully do harm to others, since that really is a pretty basic standard).

Pretty heady stuff, huh? I think Petrarch said it best. We should be careful about offering judgments of others. We should only strive to be the kind of person that we conceive to be a good person. And then simply stay more alert to those who would willfully do harm to others and ourselves.

But . . .I’m just sayin’

Universal Appreciation.

This was in one of my first blogs but came up missing. Curious. So this is a reprise. Right now I have too many essays started and none finished. I'll try to finish one over the weekend.

I grew up in a perfectly sized, mid-western town. It was called a city but I thought of it as a town. No one was ever certain if there were 40 or 50 thousand people in the town but it never seemed to matter.  It was a good town. I say was because I have not lived there for over 30 years and I know things change. There are two rivers running through the heart of the town. One of them was perfect for swimming and boating. I was fortunate that my family’s home was located on the banks of that river and I took full advantage of it.

Due to the very nature of my surroundings; the beauty of the spring flowers along the river, the amazing array of fish we could catch nearly year ‘round, the adorable teenage girls that would sunbathe on the piers in the summer months, often gave me pause to think. What’s this all about? As a young teen I pretty much understood why I appreciated the sunbathers. But, why do I appreciate tulips? My dog couldn’t care less about the delicate beauty of a tulip. The ability to perceive of and appreciate so much of our world, our universe, is purely human. But why? Why us? Why us God?

My childhood and church going was a constant battle of wills. Go fishing? Go to church. Go fishing? Go to church. Go fishing. My parents were Presbyterians. I was a Communicant’s Class dropout. By the time I hit high school age, the act of attending church was far from my mind. Did I believe in God? Honestly, I don’t remember. When I went on to college though, and realized that I know everything, I began to think back on my early years as a kid asking why. But I added another query into the mix. Where? Where is God?  Not who or what, but where. So I set out in my mind to answer the question. I knew I could find the answer because college-age students are the smartest people in the world. After very little biblical or philosophical research, I had it. God is everywhere! Oh, I know, you hear that all the time. But this was different.

God is everywhere because he is us.  Yup. It was us who wrote the Bible, right? It is the collective minds of mankind that conceive of religions and develop them into something that is supposed to help teach us right from wrong. So instead of saying that God is everywhere in our lives helping us get through the tough times, why can’t we just accept that he is us? You and me and your jerky neighbor who just painted his house mauve; we are God. So when we pray, are we praying to some bearded fellow sitting on a throne beyond the universe? Or are we simply helping to put our hopes and wishes into our minds to direct us to some positive end? It seems okay to presume so, if we know that our own minds are a fractional piece of God’s mind. There, problem solved. I figured it out when I was in college. . . . . . . . Then I graduated.

College smugness seems to quickly disappear when a person goes out into the real world. Like most of my friends, marriage and family happened to me over the next 20 or so years. Before my daughter was born, I really didn’t take much time for spirituality and the old questions that I so easily answered years back. But then something happened to me that changed everything.

On the day of the birth of my daughter, the center of my universe shifted. It shifted from me to her. I realized that day that if someone said that I must die so that this little bundle may live . . . no problem. With the universe no longer about me, I began to ask questions again. But this time I had lots of questions. I read books; Cosmology and Philosophy books. Maybe I should call them “scientific theory” and “thought theory” books. I was impressed that so many of the truly brainy scientists had such strong faiths. God seemed to always be an integral part of their scientific psyche. I have often been disheartened to witness the fact that organized, mostly Christian, religions tend to denounce scientific theory and discovery while scientists seem to embrace religion and God. Can’t we all just get along?

After my divorce and my daughter reaching her late teens, my universe shifted once again. This time it began to center around God. As I read more Big Bang Theory and  Black Hole Theory and as our telescopes reached further back in time to the very  beginning of the universe, I began to realize that I never had the answers. I wasn't even close. But it didn't matter much. Now I wasn't only perceiving of and appreciating that tulip on the riverbank, I was becoming completely rapt in the total package. I remember a line from Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” in which a lovesick Emily Webb blurts out “Oh World, You’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you.” Profound? Yes. True? Also yes. I’ll never know all the answers. But, perceiving of and appreciating as much of our universe as possible, is to me, a noble quest. It is my humble opinion that God cracks a little smile as we continue to inch closer to the answers.

Many of the greatest minds today are churning up scientific evidence that lends itself perfectly to the possibility that the gap between science and theology is rapidly closing.  Cosmology is the study of the physical universe from the very big to the very small. String Theory is a result of cosmologists, through mathematical models, coming up with really difficult stuff to understand that tends to reveal the possibility that God is among us. The really brainy people working on this are pretty convinced that there are many more dimensions than just three in our world. The reason we cannot see into these other dimensions is because all matter and light are stuck in only three dimensions. Some cosmologists have concluded that there are as many as 11 dimensions.

OK . . . work with me on this. If we can accept that our universe around us has a lot of stuff going on that we cannot see or perceive of, does it not make sense to presume then that God could have a very comfortable spot to hang out in like maybe the eighth dimension, eating popcorn and watching us create all sorts of entertaining quandaries for his, and our amusement? Then, when we really screw up, he can project through those dimensions and touch our lives in ways that we cannot feel in our limited world but we just know He had something to do with fixing the problem.

No matter how many dimensions there are, the three we've got have lent themselves pretty well to giving me the ability to appreciate the universe. To remember springtime, sitting on that riverbank watching the meandering water flow by while perfectly formed teenage girls seem to tan right before my eyes stretched out on the docks and tulips open themselves to an amazingly blue sky. That was my universe. It still is. Thank you God.

Divide Et Empera

Some say it was Philip II, king of Macedon, others attribute the phrase to

Julius Caesar. But “Divide et empera” is Latin for Divide and Rule, later reworded to “Divide and Conquer”. It is a statement that is ringing more true today than ever in the past 100 + years in America. It's so obvious, that it is glaring at us and we have yet to even put on sunglasses to take a better look.

Valerie Jarrett, self proclaimed socialist and Senior White House Advisor to Barack Obama, told Matt Lauer on the Today Show soon after the election that put this man in as President, that he, Barack Obama, would begin to rule the country in January. Rule? Is the President of the United States now a ruler? In the eyes of this administration he is. And what is the best way to rule the dumb masses? Divide! And do they ever divide! Our new ruler has succeeded in dividing this country socially, economically and by the sexes.

The so-called Fair Pay Act has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with election-year politics. No one expected that bill to become law. The whole point of this political exercise is to get Republicans on record voting against "fairness" for women, as part of the Democrats' campaign strategy to claim that there is a "war on women."

Obama’s war on success is astounding and insulting at the same time. But divide he must. We now have mainstream media parrots as well as plenty of angry Americans spewing hate-filled rhetoric towards the “richest 1 percent” or even successful Americans in general. “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”. Obama knows he can throw up these offensive assaults, no matter how outrageous they are, anytime he wants. His faithless followers will take the bait and continue to echo his rancor to open another chasm in our newly fragile country.

Now he has his minions doing the work for him. Last week after Mr. Cathy’s comments about his own beliefs on redefining marriage, we have three mayors of major cities vowing to suppress freedom of trade in their respective domains (which, by the way, cannot be more against the law) by refusing to allow business licenses to Chick-Fil-A. Amazing? Yes. Effective? Absolutely. Do you think Rahm Emanuel did not know that carrying out his threat would be illegal? Of course he did. He knew (and he was taught by the masters) that it would start a firestorm in America and further divide us into social and anti-social groups. All the more easy to rule, you know.

I can recall several instances in my lifetime where our presidents have urged unity, working in America as one, and a general sense of helping our fellow neighbors. JFK once said:

“Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and Necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.”

You will never hear words like that for our Dear Ruler.

Ironically, from the mouth of a second-rate thief came the words that, I am guessing, has also never been uttered by anyone in the Obama administration. “Can’t we all get along?”