This is not a ROBOCALL

I’m amazed sometimes at how much I’m asked to put up with.

Or, put more grammatically: How much I am asked to put up with amazes me sometimes.

               For instance: I picked up my mail yesterday and took home about 5 pieces addressed to me and left another 5 or so in the recycling bin at the post office. Of the 5 I took home, only a couple were actually business that I needed to attend to; the others were appeals for donations.

               As I was opening my mail, my phone rang and since I haven’t chosen a musical ring tone, the jangling raked across my nerves. I picked it up and answered, but the delay in the response told me it was another robocall (call placed by a dialing robot) and I slammed the receiver down. In the evening, I decided to watch The Fugitive, a classic action movie starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. It took nearly three hours to watch a two-hour movie because a variety of corporations had paid for the broadcast on my behalf in exchange for the “right” to bombard me with commercial sales propaganda every few minutes.

               (I have to wonder how many Canadians realize what a prize we’ve managed to retain in CBC Radio: informative and commercial-free broadcasting. It ranks with libraries as a last bastion of choices as yet unbastardized by the intrusion of commercial propaganda.)

               And now we have had our attention drawn to the robocall in politics, probably the most cynical intrusion ever into the heart of democracy. It’s message is clear: voters are not the sovereign, informed citizens we used to think they had to be to vote; they are manipulatable consumers, equally fair game to the manufacturers of Tide, or to the Conservative (or NDP, or Liberal) Party of Canada. The debate on Parliament Hill as to who did it properly or who did it fraudulently should cause citizens to throw up in pure disgust. All parties have apparently succumbed to the use of a model pioneered by commercial advertising, a model that tramples on personal autonomy, demeans the human spirit by making of it a commodity.

               Shame on all of you!

               But how do these things ever change? How is bad practice reversed in a democracy? Parties that win elections are unlikely to change the practices that got them into office. Parties seeking election are bound to copy the methods leading to success for the winners. Corporations that have won a profitable niche in the marketplace are unlikely to give up the pressure tactics that got them there in favour of common decency and sensitivity.

               And here’s the real rub; it happens because we allow it. And we allow it because consumerism is eminently easier and more tempting than informed citizenship. What I as a single citizen need to do to help change happen is obvious: boycott what is manipulative and crass and promote in whatever way I can that which has integrity, honesty, dignity. Lean toward media that aren’t driven by advertising; shop where customers are treated with respect and dignity, even if it costs a bit more; take exception to pressure tactics by politicians, even if they represent “my party;” recycle junk mail unread.

               And maybe, hire a robocall company to target every MP and MLA with the following message . . . repeatedly: “We’re all watching you; either shape up or resign.”          

. . . since we belong to the day

Ground cover

Daisy and Silverberry

^.

⁶ So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober. ⁷ For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. ⁸ But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. (I Thessalonians 5: 6 – 8)

¹² The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. (Romans 13: 12)

Numerous Biblical references make the point that people who set out to perform nefarious deeds do so under cover of darkness. Light/darkness makes for a powerful metaphor; the contrasts between day and night are deeply embedded in the human psyche and unlike the parables that include objects like sheep or goats, for instance, we universally experience day turning to night turning to day approximately once each, every 24 hours.

               Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians quoted above is obviously referring more specifically to the need for alertness and wakefulness (characterized by our daytime persona) as opposed to the unconsciousness of sleep or drunkenness (as in our nighttime persona). But today I’m more interested in night/day as a metaphor for secrecy versus openness, what is private versus what is public. What we draw the blinds against and what we do and say openly. What we do and say under the glare of the sun versus what we wait for darkness to say and do.

               The federal government introduced a bill this week to allow the police to tap into email and cell phone records and communications without first obtaining a warrant from a judge. The justification for this was given as a need to take drastic measures against child pornographers, for whom the internet has become a virtual “night,” a place where wickedness can be perpetrated under cover of cyber-darkness.

               The olden-days version of this would be the granting of the right to police officers to open anybody’s mail, or plant listening or other surveillance devices in a home without a judge’s warrant. The very idea raised hackles across the country and Vic Toews had to do the two things he appears to hate most: backtracking and apologizing.

               The relevant question remains: what right do you and I have as regards what is private and what is open to public access?  Obviously, it’s not a case of one or the other, so where the line is drawn between what is public and what is private . . . is crucial. We have the examples of NAZI Germany, Stalin’s USSR and present-day North Korea to remind us of the folly of drawing the surveillance line too close to the public-access extreme. In Canada today, we certainly wouldn’t want the police to have the right to open our snail mail without proving to a judge first that it was absolutely necessary; neither will we stand for willy-nilly access to our emails and phone communications.

               Agnes and I once took a teachers’ tour to the Soviet Union and were housed in the Rossia Hotel just off Red Square for four or five nights. People warned us that all the rooms were probably bugged and we imagined what information of value would be gleaned from our private conversations in our hotel room at night, and since the hotel had hundreds of rooms, how many people would be required to monitor what was being said . . . and we had a few laughs making up nonsense phrases for the KGB’s edification.

 “We belong to the day,” as the Apostle Paul says, but that, unfortunately, is a description of life in the Kingdom of God and doesn’t describe our current world well. Would that it did. There, we don’t hide behind the cover of cyber-darkness to throw anonymous bombs. There, we sign our opinions, pronouncements and announcements. There, we don’t make up avatars to represent us. There we are more like Harper Bell’s Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the same in the street as we are at home.

There, there is no need for surveillance privileges that reach into the pockets of citizens to see what secrets are hidden there.

There, we belong to the day.

If our lives lack direction, then consider that there really is only one purpose, and that is to hasten that day when night is banished and we all are people of the day.

Or is that too much of a pipe dream?

(I apologize for the sermon; it got away on me.)