dystopian farce
it is laughable if you
don’t have to live it
Adapted from the line, “It’s pretty much a dystopian farce,” said Kathleen Miller Green, an assistant professor of child development who attended the nearly six-hour, capacity-crowd meeting at the school’s student union building on Feb. 22. “It’s laughable if you don’t have to live it.”, in the New York Times article, The Politicization of North Idaho College, by Daniel Berehulak.
It was too good a line with too much application to today’s United States to let it go past.
“It’s pretty much a dystopian farce,” it’s laughable if you don’t have to live it.”
So quoted is Kathleen Miller Green, an assistant professor of child development at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, a town of 56,000 in the Idaho Panhandle.
See, according to the article, the county Republican Party holds a majority on the North Idaho College board. They have denounced liberal “indoctrination” by the college faculty and vowed to bring the school administration’s “deep state” to heel and “Make N.I.C. Great Again.”
I apologize to the people of the great state of Idaho but saying, Make North Idaho College Great Again out loud makes me laugh.
It’s IS laughable.
Until.
Until it isn’t.
And it isn’t as we all have to live it.
And is isn’t as it isn’t just the North Idaho College, it is small colleges, schools, churches, libraries, township boards and zoning commissions everywhere.
It gets very scary quickly.
Here in the low country of South Carolina, a feller was convicted of murder pretty much evidence from his own cell phone that showed where he was, or at least where his phone was (and he was NEVER with his phone), how his phone moved around, whether in a car or walking and what he used his phone for.
While I have little problem with this specific case, think of how, in general, we are all being tracked.
All that data is there.
All that data is real.
All that data can and will be used against you.
Live a good life and you got little to worry about.
Still, there is a concern over WHO has control or even access to this data.
Imagine a local police force, or for example, the Michigan State Police (an awful awe inspiring title when you think about it, so says Jim Harrison) with access to the data.
Or worse, imagine the North Idaho College Board of Regents with access to this data.
Tracking faculty.
Tracking students.
On the one hand, It’s pretty much a dystopian farce,”
On the one hand, it’s laughable
On the other hand, it’s laughable if you don’t have to live it.
And we all have live it.
We all have to live with it.
What part of this is making us great again?
For decades, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a daily column called simply, My Day.
If you wonder why any one would care about Mrs. Roosevelt’s day, just look at the subheadings in the online archive.
They include, White House Years (1935-1941), White House Years (1942-1945 WW2), United Nations, (1946-1951- Post UN years (1953-1962).
In her December 12, 1953 Column, she wrote about attending a meeting to celebrate Brandeis University and she commented about the ‘Red Scare’ that dominated US politics at the time.
She wrote: The attacks on our schools today and on our clergy are of course only incidents but they reflect a little the attitude toward educated people.
We are all of us opposed to the evils of fascism and communism but in fighting these evils we must beware lest we adopt the very methods used by fascists and communists and find ourselves destroying things of value in our own country when what we really are trying to destroy is a foreign concept with which we disagree and yet which we are being led to copy.
No Haiku For You 