The Cost of Lost Privacy

The other day I heard about a 23-year-old Rutger's student who killed himself after a video his roommate took (without his knowledge) of his sexual encounter with a man (who did not know he was being recorded ) surfaced on the web. Everybody got to see it. Unfortunately, that included friends and family of the young man, who did not know he was gay.

There was a trial to determine if the roommate who took and shared the video should be punished for a hate crime. There was much debate over whether the video caused the suicide; the issue of whether or not the roommate meant to cause harm because he hated gays; and the suggestion that perhaps he was just having a little good old fashioned boy fun.

Here's what: It should be a crime for good old fashioned boy fun to include public humiliation and/or invasion of personal privacy--regardless of the motivation. Privacy is a necessary tool for healthy development. We simply must be able to take actions in private that we would never want made public. This is because we are supposed to learn from our mistakes. If every mistake we make is made public--we are never able to ask ourselves how we really feel, what we really need or what we ought to do. Instead, we will always be bombarded by someone else's opinions or ideas. This prevents honest evaluation. This makes it impossible to grow into one's self--it sabotages the kind of personal transformation that can lead to real happiness and a sense of belonging in the world. This is a form of slavery.

The current exhibitionist fad of exposing oneself almost completely in order to gain fame and/or fortune is much more dangerous than anybody seems willing to admit. I don't know if anybody's noticed, but real celebrities who are known because of their talent and skill tend to hide from the press--they crave anonymity. There is a reason for that: they understand the value of privacy to self-image; self-development; self-worth and self-awareness. Yet despite their desire to maintain it, our laws make it acceptable for photographers to torment and dog celebrities anywhere they go. The logic: they chose a public life.

I don't agree. I think they chose a public profession. Their lives should be as private as they choose. When they appear at a public function, with the goal of promoting their career, bring in the paparazzi--that's what they're for. But when they go to a wedding or a grocery store or to yoga--leave them alone.

Trump's Plan IS Chaos: It's how he'll justify martial law and postpone the election

The more chaos, the more hateful and divisive we become as a society, the greater the chances Trump will be able to justify declaring martial law to postpone the election.

It’s what Putin would do.

I believe Trump wants this country to fall apart. He can’t win the election fairly, so he needs to dismantle as much of our democracy as possible before November. Between his war on mail-in voting and his decision to let the pandemic rage without any attempt to effectively handle it, he’s setting us up to lose control.

All Trump has to do to ensure the violence he needs to justify military intervention is to continue to ignore reality. He doesn’t have to hide evidence of his negligence because his negligence ensures we don’t generate evidence. I haven’t seen a single statistic on Covid deaths since the protests began. It’s like the virus disappeared—just like Trump said it would.

Data? Who needs data? Trump and his allies have us exactly where they want us, debating reality while our county sinks deeper into chaos. His latest public relations stunt, using tear gas and mounted police to move peaceful protestors out of the way so he could use the space for a photo op, has just added to the confusion. Rather than waiting until force is needed, he proactively used it as if to say “See what they made me do.”

The combination of mixed messages and Trump’s insistence on mischaracterizing the actions and motives of people exercising their right to peaceful protest are designed to create an appearance of unrest that is not backed by reality.

While the world reacts to the murder of yet another black man at the hands of white law enforcement officials, and suffers from a virus that’s killing people of color in disproportional numbers, we are unable to create an effective plan to stop either scourge because we can’t figure out exactly what is happening.

The few tools we have for such situations have been taken from us. We are no longer supporting the W.H.O. There will be no nationwide effort to understand the virus, fight it, control it, or defeat it. Companies will compete to create what we’ll need to eventually go back to life somewhat akin to normal, but it won’t be our government that leads the way. Our current administration will continue to do whatever they can to keep us so confused about what’s happening around us that we can’t mobilize. The more chaotic the better.

Our calls of protest, designed to spur action to hold George Floyd’s murderers accountable, are being met with a level of hostility and dismissiveness we’ve never seen from the leader of our country before. The very thought of using the military to stop these demonstrations is antithetical to democracy, and yet this is what Trump suggests.

The current state of unrest is about a lot more than a pandemic; it is more than a fight between white vs. black, Democrat vs. Republican, or Socialist vs. Capitalist. It is a fight against the status quo, a way of life determined by a select group of white men (with no intention of including lesser white men, women, or people of color in their version of democracy), men who currently rule the world, and the rest of us, the ones who do the work.

This is the message Trump’s administration is sending: “I’m still The Man, and there is nothing you can do about it.” That is the message of George Floyd’s death.

Message received. But they are wrong.

In this largely unregulated capitalistic society, the abusive white male is the real welfare recipient in our country. He uses his status, power and societal affiliations to maintain power and control despite his inability to provide real value. His goal is to keep his power at all costs.

If we want to change this, we need to start by admitting that our country is largely run by thugs. And the main thug, Donald Trump, is setting an example that encourages the worst of them to be even more brazen than before.

Research shows what we say about others says more about us than it does about the objects of our comments. That is due, in part, to a psychological tendency known as projection. When abusive people in powerful positions make accusations, they are often merely projecting their own inadequacies and misdeeds onto others. The weaknesses, flaws, and generally negative attributes Trump and his cronies systematically assign to people outside their class are often clues to their own inner nature. Their words are often nothing more than proof of how they think and feel, not evidence of the black man’s failings, or the immigrants’ crimes, or a woman’s inadequacies.  

When people project their own inner nature onto others, they show who they are. When a white woman called the police on a black man who asked her to leash her dog, she was harassing him, not the other way around.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor, as one of Trump’s supporters claimed. But one of Donald Trump’s buddies, Jeffrey Epstein, was arranging sex with minors for his high-profile friends, using several luxury homes for his sordid operations.

Ahmaud Arbery wasn’t stealing; he walked into a home under construction (as did others caught on camera) and was later found jogging (empty handed) when he was shot. Mr. Arbery wasn’t looking for trouble; the two white men who shot him were.

We must stop allowing the rhetoric of the white, male-dominated ruling class to continue to divide us. They’ve had thousands of years of rule, and they’ve left a mess. It’s time for women, and enlightened men of all colors to take over and save our country and this planet. Mother Nature is already fighting the good fight (I refer to the weather, Covid-19, and other acts of nature we’ve caused by the ignorance, greed, and gluttony that has driven people to destroy our planet for profit).

Those who support the current power structure—whether they are active abusers or quietly complicit in allowing it to continue without protest—are now equally guilty, just as the officers who held George Floyd down while he was being murdered right in front of them are guilty.

The word is out. We see the reality, and it is not okay. For centuries, human beings have institutionalized the concept that white people are superior to other races, and men are superior to women. We have all been groomed to believe it. Yet reliance on cult like obedience and networks of bullies to maintain their power is proof they are not superior. They can’t win honorably, so they win by threat.

In a true democracy, people rise in society based on their contributions. In a true democracy, these parasites would be the ones who are homeless. Let’s stop believing their hype. Let’s stop letting them play. Let’s stop letting them win. Let’s beat them at their own game. Let’s just ignore them.

The rest of us simply need to join forces and vote Trump and the entire Republican party out of office. Then we can focus on making our country work for everybody. It’s what George Floyd would want. It’s what his grieving brother, Terrence, is begging us to do. Let’s give them what they want. Let’s make this count for something.