The Last of our Freedoms
Since returning from a trip to Kazakhstan with a broken back in mid August, I've been home recuperating. That has meant being in my house far more than normal, subject to the what happens around here when I'm normally gallivanting around the world. On one hand, this has allowed me to finish six books so far and I'm busy on five more. What a luxury.
On the other hand it's allowed me to become a student of how the outside world- whether it's the great minds at Google determined to get us to remember and react to ads on line or the increasingly sophisticated phone scammers- seek to rip apart our privacy.
I grew up on farm land surrounded by woods. The loudest thing was Nature herself. Mostly the tree frogs after a rain. The night sounds were deafening, but not if they put you to sleep. Today I have a sound machine that plays the same night music: crickets, tree frogs, toads, chuck-will's-widows. A lullaby.
Now, we have the dings, pings, alarms, rings and all the ways that our devices demand out attention. NOW they shriek. Answer the phone! Pick up your device! Check your email! Your texts! The doorbell rings, you HAVE to answer it.
NO I DO NOT. I don't have to do any of these things. I am not Pavlov's dog and neither are you. However that's what we've become.
Part of the scammer problem is of course that international scammers have gotten far more sophisticated at circumventing American laws. The FCC can't regulate calls coming in from overseas. Some businesses call you repeatedly after you've worked with them even after you've told them to cease and desist. It boggles the mind. The entire world seems to see every American as a walking ATM machine.
From fake Linked In to fake FedEx and DHL emails to Condom.com, they have gotten truly canny. And the phone calls? Well if it's not the IRS threatening to sue me, it's someone posing to raise money for the Police Widows' society. Doorbells? People selling roofing I don't need to overpriced chocolate I don't eat to Girl Scout Cookies I no longer support. TV ads for toxic food? I go to the nearest doorway-mounted pullup bar and get busy. That's if the TV happens to be on, which is rare indeed.
You do NOT own my brainwaves. I do.
Or I just turn my alarms off. Voice mail was designed to take messages. Technology does not own me. I own it. My Android device can sit in the corner and gather cobwebs for all I care. I'll check it when I damned well please. Most phone numbers listed- if called back- don't work. Scammers. In some cases calling them back is dangerous. Delete.
If you think that you couldn't possibly live without being constantly connected, Google and Verizon and At&T and Corporate America and all the rest already have their hooks deeply embedded in you and they know it. And use it. All of them are using their best and brightest to figure out- not how to make us better citizens or develop brighter kids- but to sell more crap. Online, on TV, on the radio, at the gas pump. Imagine you're coming home from having to bury your father and you have to get fuel. You can't even stand there in silent grief without being harangued by a television at your local gas pump. What is wrong with corporate America that they think we don't want, need, CRAVE a moment of silence in our lives, to get AWAY from their incessant drivel? What's next, you insert a plug into a newborn's ear? Don't underestimate these people. The pounding of powerful advertising starts very young. Just look at Saturday morning cartoons. Remember candy cigarettes? That was, literally, child's play compared to today's level of sophistication. Getting kids addicted to sugar sells a great many products which you are still buying- for them and for you. Coke, anyone?
In 2013 a guy from DirecTV insisted on selling me the football package when I was spending the entire month of November in Tanzania. He wouldn't understand that I had no interest whatsoever in watching a Broncos game while scaling Kilimanjaro. Seeing the last of the earth's great mammals before poachers wipe them out. Idiot. There is no end to the invasion of our headspace. They're determined to find more ways to get you to subliminally ask "how high?" when their ping says "JUMP!"
I've long learned that too much time on Facebook makes me either upset or angry, and studies have long shown that it's very unhealthy. Besides every single thing I do is being tracked, studied and encoded. If I browse online clothing stores for fun, each item I ever look at even by accident gets thrown in my face again and again by advertisers who have paid dearly for that tracking information. Now they are screaming bloody murder BUYBUYBUYBUY. I deeply resent that someone is watching me that closely. I repay that intrusion by not purchasing a damned thing. Screw you and your Big Brother analytics. I will reward a local brick and mortar where I don't feel as though I have a camera up the kazoo. I buy from my buddies as much as I can. You can argue that I have control over these ads. No, I don't. I've followed every single instruction available to put a stop to them. That only reduces, but does not stop, the ads, and I guarantee you it doesn't prevent the analysis of my keystrokes online.
If you don't think you are owned, operated and manipulated by Big Business, Big Government, Big Food, Big Sugar, Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Technology, I would emphatically invite you to read Dr. Robert Lustig's painstakingly researched, wonderfully funny and freeing new book The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of our Bodies and Brains.
Long an enemy of Big Food with his attacks on sugar, since his 2012 book Fat Chance was published, Lustig earned a law degree. It shows. His sweeping, in-depth research is both breathtaking and frightening. Since 1987, I'd long since redrawn my boundaries, losing 90 pounds, reclaiming my health, establishing thoughtful exercise and eating habits and becoming my own first line of defense against a medical community that doesn't believe in prevention. Lustig validated how right I was to make those decisions. I've simply extended these practices to my inner sanctum. I'm not giving my personal freedom away. Lustig shows the way out of the traps and how to take your life back in hand. It's a stunning read.
The great Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi death camps and wrote one of the world's seminal books on freedom: Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl wrote of the grotesque deprivations the prisoners suffered. How he survived. What he ultimately learned was that the Nazis couldn't take what a man chose not to give of his own accord. He wrote:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
It is this fundamental freedom that we are forfeiting as we allow technology- and all the entities behind it- to invade, influence, and run our lives even as we falsely believe we are still in charge.
Every single time you leap for your phone when it pings, text when your drive, "have to have" that Krispy Kreme donut, overreact to fake news, reach for a scotch instead of talk to a friend, pop a pill instead of go outside for a walk, you demonstrate how much you are owned and manipulated by those who have been invading your sacred space.
Those who have- my intentional choice of words- raped your right to choose your own way.
We haven't been the "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" for a very long time.
If you want to test this theory, see how hard it is to live without your iPhone for a day or more. Eschew Facebook. Grab healthy food instead of something toxic, easy and cheap. Don't compulsively grab your phone every time a text comes in. Don't interrupt a conversation every time your phone buzzes or rings. Most of our kids can't do it. They're already on the umbilical cord. Signed, sealed and delivered.
What is today's fave kid time out? Not grounding any more. No phone privileges. OMG the world has ended. Our kids are taken over by devices earlier and earlier because parents have checked out.
The Matrix comes to mind for a reason - except it's not our energy being drained but our earning capacity, our wallet power that's being drained, our attention span and where we put it in order to get us to spend. Right down to our very last days, our kids' and grandkids' inheritances being sucked out of us at a rate of tens of thousands of dollars a month as we lie in a hospital bed while our families stand by. Great for the stockholders in a for-profit healthcare system. Not so great for our loved ones. And as Lustig points out in so many ways, completely preventable.
How hard are you willing to fight for your real freedom? The only one each and every one of us actually has, which is our birthright?
The right to choose your own way.
People are always complaining they have no time for anything worthwhile: being with their kids, cooking decent food, playing outside (what's left of it), exercising, the good stuff. Turn off all the devices that own you and voila'. Amazing how many hours you have. Same hours you had before. You just reclaimed them from the corporate vampires, the scammers, the invaders of your personal privacy. Your right to to have a life of your own choosing.
I'm a military serial rape survivor. I know when I've been groped, attacked, taken advantage of and outright violated. That's precisely what's going on here. I can't speak for you, but in the immortal words of news anchor Howard Beale in the 1976 Academy Award winning film Network,
"I'm mad as hell an I'm not going to take this any more!"
My devices can buzz and chirp to their hearts' content. I've got books to read, articles to write, a healthy dinner to cook, exercises to finish, friends to see and a life to live.
And so does everyone else, if you choose.