Security, like living happily ever after, belongs in the never-never-land of children's tales. It rarely exists; certainly not in modern reality, and in fact I doubt that it ever was thick on the ground. In those long ago days of our childhood, perhaps we locked the doors at night and counted ourselves pretty secure. But we had other terrors much worse than a midnight thief. Prior to Salk's invention of a vaccine in the early 1950's, we, or certainly our parents on our behalf, lived in constant terror of polio attacking our young limbs. Childhood diseases raged through schools and communities: measles and mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough, diptheria and meningitis. Today we are protected from most of those diseases but still left with little security as to health. We have to worry about old sicknesses returning in a new resistant form, or new ones - at least to us - suddenly appearing in the news, such as bird flu and sars, West Nile and Zika. Added to that, we have the fears of not being able to pay for the health care we need, just as our forebears feared it for themselves.
But at least our forefathers did not suffer from our insecurities of lack of privacy. Perhaps we have a physical privacy they lacked, but we live in constant trepidation of just how much personal information, down to the minutest detail, is available to anyone who cares to pluck it from the ether. Just this weekend I began filling out on-line applications for car and home insurance. I was amazed and appalled by the amount of data that was entered for me automatically the moment I put in my name and the first digits of my street address. It knew the answers to it's own questions about me: it knew Betsy was my spouse, it knew every detail about her. It informed me that we are both retired and have no dependents. It filled in the year and model of our cars. Yes, I know none of this should surprise me, and at some level it did not. But there was something very unsettling about seeing it in action. A form meant for me to fill out was completed almost entirely, and accurately, by some unknown and invisible entity in cyberspace. I was a minimal presence in the whole process.
Not that here is much security in insurance, anyway. As our beleaguered climate swings from one extreme to another, natural disasters abound, and insurance rates soar. Before long I fear that all but the absolute minimal coverage will be unaffordable to many. Even if you can afford it, it is frequently unavailable. Live near the coast? Live in a floodplain? Well, gee, it just might flood there, so you can't have insurance because you might need it. And these so-called floodplains are seriously iffy anyway, identified by computers in the garbage in/garbage out mode. I used to live in Lyons in a little house on top of a 100-foot cliff above the river, but the house location was identified as high risk of flooding and I could not buy flood insurance; not that I would have, anyway. In the terrible floods of 2013, most of the town of Lyons was washed away. But my old house stood firm and dry.
Our use of computers and all they offer can destroy our illusions of security in countless ways.
I have always, I believe, been a faithful friend. I value friendship highly, chose friends carefully, and feel safe and secure in those relationships. One of my longtime friends was a man I had worked with at IBM for thirty years. He had been supportive at the time of my coming out; he and his wife invited Betsy and me to their home and they visited ours. After he and I both retired we sent e-mails back and forth - jokes and cartoons and such - in the way most of us do.
We had a distribution list of old colleagues and scattered this silliness around. Suddenly, one day, I opened up one of these messages from my friend to find, to my disbelief and horror, pages of gay-bashing rantings. This was not tasteless homophobic humor, which I might, just possibly, have forgiven. This was pure vitriol. Hate-mongering gleaned and forwarded from all around the web. Tears poured down as I re-read it, fancying the first reading to be some kind of delusion. No. The hateful words remained. I just could not believe that he had kept such feelings from me for so many years, or that he had sent this garbage to me. I could only suppose, and still think, that he simply lost track of who exactly was on that particular distribution list. They can be dangerous things if you don't pay attention. Whatever the reason, his true colors were clear to us all. After a night of sleeping on it, or, to be accurate, tossing awake on it, I replied. I acknowledged my heartbreak over such an ending to what I had always believed to be a firm and sincere friendship. I searched hopefully through my messages the following days, and then weeks, honestly expecting a reply; some kind of apology, some kind of explanation. None came.
I never heard from him again.
I never quite recovered from that incident. It robbed me of an innocence over friendship which I doubt I can regain. But I have tried to deal with it rationally and without allowing it to drag me down into complete cynicism and destroy other friendships, or my desire to make new ones. I have learned to say, with almost complete sincerity, that another person's homophobia is their problem not mine. The same could be said, I suppose, of duplicity, but I find that so much harder to bear. It is not my friend's homophobia that hurts so much, but the pretense, the subterfuge, the deceit.
Now, securely at home as a member of this storytelling group, I feel something very like my old innocence return. Perhaps lost innocence can be regained, after all. I feel safe and secure here.
I don't fear that you are going to exhibit any duplicity; any pretense. I don't believe that you are saying mean-spirited things about me behind my back. Oh sure, a little gossip and tattle-tale, but not real hard-core back-biting derision.
Security like that is hard to find. Reviewing it reminds me of the honor which has been bestowed on me and the pride I feel in being a member of this group.
© March 2016
About the Author
No comments:
Post a Comment