Hey! That’s Private!
The Source
Hey! That’s Private! My Schwan’s Food man makes fun of me. He’ll stop at my door, whip out his new catalog, then as I flip through the pages he’ll start to grin, finally saying, “The microwave stuff begins on the next page.” He knows that if I can’t zap it, I won’t buy it. I tell him, “What’s the use of buying pre-made food when I’ve got to go inside and make it?” I’m a love, not a cooker. All the flap about privacy and how much of it we’re losing puzzles me. Heck, anyone who’s alive in this century and not living in some cabin atop an Appalachian hillside has already given up most of what used to be secret. Who doesn’t have a pharmacist who knows which parts of your body ache? If you get the same blood pressure prescription for 30 years, chances are good that the lady behind the counter knows you might suffer from hypertension. Yes, you sign a highly laughable privacy statement every time you stop at the drug counter, but do you have to purchase a tube of Neosporin or Claradryl before they catch on that you might itch a bit? Our last privacy went out with Eisenhower. So what’s the big deal? I used to do the bulk of my grocery shopping at a little one-woman store in Arenzville. The owner’s name was Cloetta. I once bought a loaf of bread and she took it back, saying, “You already have bread. You bought it yesterday.” She was right. And more than once she told me, “You should be running low on toilet paper.” At first I feared she was going by the look on my face, but later realized that in a small town privacy is a four-letter-word. (We don’t spell well, either.) How many times do you have to get a 40-pound package of dog food from Amazon before your UPS man starts getting wary of a mutt meeting him at the door? What sort of postmaster couldn’t figure out that after your fifth package from “Explosives Are Us” that you might be a dangerous character? Privacy, schmi-vacy. We lost it a long time ago, Bubba. And this lack of secrets isn’t limited to small-town groceries and mailmen. I purchased my weekly broccoli and cashew salad at County Market and the friendly lady at the cash register said, “You must really like that.” I must face it. I am known. For good or ill, the world knows all about me. Sometimes this does not work to a person’s advantage. When I walk into Captain’s Quarters and tell Dick Sweeney that I need a few pairs of pants, it throws me off my stride to have him size me up and say, “Well, I think you’ve gained a little weight.” Good memories are over-rated. It’s even more irritating when he’s right. Of course sometimes we lose our last vestiges of privacy because we’re just plain stupid. I wouldn’t say that naïve teenagers are at the top of the stupidity meter, but they certainly rank in the top ten when they post all manner of delicate information on Facebook then are truly mortified and offended when they find that someone….like their mothers … have read it. I once phoned a student of mine who’d put a late-night post on her Facebook page, saying that she was at a certain spot in Springfield late a night and was about to drive home. I practically screamed into the phone, “Don’t do that! A young girl does not broadcast to the world that she’s out somewhere alone late at night! Are you crazy?” She informed me that she’d only meant for her friends to read her post. Duh. Her friends and the billion other Facebook subscribers. The other common fallacy among some dumb-clucks is to think that if they put a message on the Internet then change their mind a few days later and delete it, that it’s actually gone. Wrong, honey. Like an obnoxious relative, it hangs around forever. Maybe everyone needs to spend a little time living in a small town where privacy is negligible. Besides, around here we don’t call our voyages into your private life nosiness. We smile and label it “concern.” If I’m gone for a couple of days and a strange car parks in front of my house, chances are good that one of my neighbors will come out and ask the stranger if she can help him. I’ll give up a bit of privacy for that. And frankly, when Google tracks where I’ve been and shopped, that really doesn’t bother me. No Google-ite will ever know that I don’t need a loaf of bread or that I’m nearly out of toilet paper. You’ve got to live in a small town for that sort of communal living.