Avi

word craft

blog

Freedom is never free

The last thing I want to do is intro­duce pol­i­tics into my blog com­ments, but I feel com­pelled to write about the recent State of Texas abor­tion law. Not about the issue or debate about abor­tion. You have your views. I have mine. Per­haps they are dif­fer­ent. Per­haps they are the same. You won’t find a debate here. No, what I need to com­ment about are those pro­vi­sions in the Texas law that asks and incen­tivizes (with mon­ey!) cit­i­zens to report on the activ­i­ties of their neighbors.

I am old enough to remem­ber the repres­sive Fas­cist regimes in West­ern Europe. I recall the Com­mu­nist regimes of Rus­sia and East­ern Europe. The Stasi in East Ger­many. (“One of the most effec­tive and repres­sive intel­li­gence and secret police agen­cies ever to exist.” (Some­time look at the Ger­man film, The Lives of Oth­ers.) I also rec­ol­lect the encour­age­ment of inform­ers in our own coun­try dur­ing the McCarthy period.

All these gov­ern­ment groups legit­imized cit­i­zens spy­ing upon their fel­low cit­i­zens. They debased soci­ety. Ruined lives. Cor­rupt­ed the social fab­ric. Made peo­ple fear­ful of one anoth­er. Killed people.

I beg you to imag­ine the dev­as­ta­tion such an inform­ing action would have on a Texas high school student.

Hermitage Bookshop

My fur­ther point here is that at some point this kind of spy­ing and inform­ing activity—in these circumstances—turns to books and what peo­ple were read­ing. Not so very long ago, here in Col­orado, an agency of the US gov­ern­ment want­ed to know what books an indi­vid­ual pur­chased from a book­store. The US Supreme Court reject­ed that par­tic­u­lar line of inquiry. I have no doubt such an inquiry will hap­pen again.

To cre­ate a soci­ety in which peo­ple are paid to spy upon one anoth­er, be it for pol­i­tics or the books they read is abhor­rent to me. As a cit­i­zen, as a writer, I feel oblig­ed to speak up.

As the old say­ing goes, “Free­dom is nev­er free.”

8 thoughts on “Freedom is never free”

  1. You are so right! Per­fect­ly stat­ed! We all need to speak up…for as we know from his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly WWII, ‘they’ could very like­ly end up com­ing for us next. And then who will speak up for us?

    Reply
  2. Thank you for shar­ing this. It’s hor­ri­fy­ing to think about the regimes that allowed and even encour­aged this. I hope this is not where we’re head­ing (even more than we have been). At the library I work at, we have a pol­i­cy of destroy­ing the due date and hold slips, any­thing with info regard­ing a patron and what mate­ri­als they check out. We’re only able to release any of this infor­ma­tion (I believe) with a war­rant or court request.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Recent Posts