Today, I sit and ponder what is happening to us.
A few days ago, what I considered an old friend emailed me this:
What do you think about registering add Republicans so that we can vote against trump in the primary?
At first, I thought it was spam. This was the entire email. No, ''hey there, been a long time." No greeting at all. Here's my reply.
I don't know if you sent this but I won't
thwart the process.... this is (sadly) the worst of Democracy.
She confirmed that it was a real question and wrote this:
I did send it, and was curious to see how you'd react
I can only suppose since we share a Facebook friendship that she'd seen a lot of my political posts which are generally anti-Trump and mostly anti-right wing these days, and thought she'd check to see if as a fiscally conservative liberal, she'd catch me in some hypocrisy.
And I was ticked off. But not so much that she felt the need to 'check' my integrity. But the fact that she questioned it. After all, if there's something I like to think about myself, it's that I'm pretty consistent. I'm honest, straight-forward, tend to wear my emotions too much on my sleeve, and speak pretty directly about any topic. I'm not afraid of what other people think of me. And we weren't close friends, just acquaintances with common friends who had hung out a number of times.
However, I think I was more disturbed by what it suggested; that we as a society are really caught in a bad place right now; that our judgments of what or who is trustworthy and what isn't is really on the chopping block and the guillotine is already in a downward motion.
Today, this was released.
Anonymous. What to do with Anonymous?
On the surface, this seems like something out of a bad movie; A spooky overseer of justice keeps an eye on the good and outs the evil in this world in a way our hand-tied legal system can't do. And here they are threatening to out Ted Cruz for his personal misbehavior(s) if he doesn't leave the race for the Presidency.
I'm no Ted Cruz fan, especially based on what I consider some of his ridiculous ideas, such as eliminating the Department of Education, abolishing the IRS, pushing a flat tax on everyone to make things "even" as he deems them, even though the current high rate of taxes is already avoided by hundreds of corporations using tax loopholes. So I could be giddy about this.
But this isn't about my emotions and how I feel. Just like electing a President shouldn't be about how you feel. Feelings betray. Senses betray us too. We've all seen things that looked and felt pretty on the outside only to find out that inside the beautiful package was a ticking time bomb (apply the metaphor to your life however you want: dating, jobs, opportunities, etc.).
So how should we be looking at a group like Anonymous at a time when so many of us think corruption is rampant among our government?
In my opinion there is only one way to view this:
Fearfully.
What this video is is blackmail plain and simple; a threat going unchecked, manipulating our elective processes that have been in place since our founding. Whether I think Ted Cruz is a crook, a scam artist or a wonderful human being is irrelevant. What a group like Anonymous is doing is a form of vigilante-ism.
You might say, well if Ted has done something wrong, he should be outed. Fine. There is a case to be made that we should know the truth about certain things. But that he should be threatened is a whole different thing, and this is a threat. It's not just a threat to Ted Cruz, but a threat to all of us.
In simpler terms, Anonymous is now our Batman, taking the law into their own hands, carefully or in this case pointedly, massaging and guiding us in the direction that Anonymous believes is correct. Yet without knowing who it is that is doing these things and what their reason is, how do we know this or these person(s) are any less corrupt than the subjects of their threats and hacks?
This is a threat to our very way of life as free people. For as long as a group can target anyone it so chooses without consequence, we are, in effect, captives. We may cheer the threats against Ted Cruz, but will not cheer the threat against a beloved Mayor, say. We may cheer the outing of a crooked businessman, but no so much when that businessman turns out to be our father. When you consider that whatever crap is posted on the internet, be it correct or incorrect, is given so much credibility when it 'trends' that a small mistake can lead to a fatal career error (like the woman on the plane who made a racial joke on twitter and by the time she landed was fired), this is the kind of thing that keeps me up nights.
And I think it should keep you up too.
Where does this tunnel lead? And where does it end?
Maybe to a place where your own acquaintances and friends email you a note to test what kind of person you are, and then disappear back to their own lives leaving you a little less trusting of them, a little more sad at the choice they've made, and a little more guarded.
And I don't believe that's a very good thing.
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