lead a private life
mostly because nobody
is interested
Up until two years ago when he had met Shelley he had led a totally private life, mostly because, he now supposed, nobody was interested. There was a specific sorrow and yearning to find a truly remote deer cabin, and trade the off-season rent of it for some maintenance.
From the Brown Dog Novellas by Jim Harrison.
In all those dystopian worlds, taking the definition of the word from the online dictionary which is, relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice, one of the underlying themes is that the state or for lack of better term, Big Brother, is watching you.
In 1984, the hero has to get up and perform calisthenics in front of a ‘view-screen’ that can never be turned off.
Every once in awhile the on screen group leader will yell at the hero to get his butt in gear.
I could never get my arms around that part of dystopia.
If you have cameras watching everybody, you need someone to watch the cameras.
As Henry Kissinger said of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, 10,000 hours of tapes will take 10,000 hours to listen to.
Why, how, could or would any one single person be worth tracking if you have a Government that is totally in control of everything.
Today someone can steal my identity.
Someone can steal my list of books that I have read.
Someone can get an image of the house where I live and sometimes that image has my car in the diveway.
Well, who wants to know?
Anyone who goes to the trouble of stealing my identity will have to deal with my credit history and my credit score along with the fact that they most likely will start getting letters from the University of Michigan Alumni Association asking for money.
Good luck dealing with all that.
Reminds me of a TV cop show where some kid walked off with someone’s stainless steel silverware and the cop told him that if brought that to a pawn shop, he would have to pay the pawnbroker to take it off his hands.
Back when I was going to Riverside Junior High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan where I grew up, I volunteered to work in the school library.
One day, sitting at the desk, I started opening drawers and found a stapled together bunch of papers.
Written on top were the words, “MASTER LIST – ALL STUDENTS.”
What it was was a mimeographed list of all the students at Riverside with their name, address, phone number as well as parents names.
I looked at for a minute and said to myself, “this is cool,” and I slipped the pages into a notebook and took it with me when I left that day.
Boy of boy, I felt like I had power.
I had everyone’s name.
I had everyone’s parent’s names.
I had their phone numbers and addresses.
And there was nothing I could do with it.
If I showed to anyone I knew it would get out that I had it.
Aside from looking at the information on some friends about who I already knew all that information.
It started to gnaw at me that I had the pages and I started thinking someone might notice they were gone from the library.
Then the pages started beating like the tell tale heart in the Poe short story.
I finally said to myself, ‘SO NOW WHAT? WHAT MIGHT YOU DO WITH ALL THIS INFORMATION?”
And the next shift I had in the library, I put it back.
SO much information.
I guess I depend on there being so much information out there that my life can remain private.
Not so much that it isn’t out there, but, gee whiz, who would be interested in me?
No Haiku For You 