PRIVACY VS. THE DRUM

God created man. Then man created the drum. We've been pounding the drum ever since.

The drum of mass communication, be it through the jungle's trees or now the planet's atmosphere. In fact, today's everyday pounding by way of today's everywhere-at-once Internet mow means you and I are in a relentless state of inter-personal communication. Whether we know it or not, like it or not.

Recently, some of us have grown to dislike it so much we've birthed a new battle-cry: Privacy.

From on-line bullying to world-wide Wikileaks, people have begun to realize we're traveling one of history's greatest human revolutions. No one, no where, no time, is anyone of us any longer a totally private person. Whatever you buy, whatever you write, whatever your join, even whatever you think, is now and forever accessible to others. And not necessarily just hackers.

Hark the worldwide realm of Facebook and Google....! You may not officially join them, but you are officially in them. Ready and willing or not, you've been vetted, profiled, and pigeon-holded.

Like every other great human revolution, this one's mighty sword has two mighty sides to it. On one side are the users; on the other the doubters. The users are already so embedded into this instant-relationship that even their brain circuitry is beginning to show signs of evolutionary adaptation. As for the doubters, sometimes they're the faces pressed against the candy store window insisting they hate sugar.

Each of humanity's previous communication revolutions got off to an equally rocky start. Printing meant literary trash could now travel faster. Telegraph, telephone, radio and television meant the same, only now right inside our own private home. Yet who among even the doubters would give them up?

For good or for bad, for now or forever, personal privacy has yielded to personal participation. How else would I re-meet long ago school chums? Faraway friends? Once-upon-a-time prom dates? Australian atheists with thundering new ideas? Canadian and Scottish countryside poets with my kinda dreams? A relics collector in the ancient hills of Cyprus, a Muslim writer in my city-of-cites Casablanca, a patriot in Pakistan, a CEO in Brazil, Europeans of all persuasions, oh and neighbors in town who we've never taken time to really talk before?

Take it from a former doubter to any doubter still left behind. This drum won't stop. So it's worth listening to. What's more, its beat is worth the beat of our own heart, because from now on we and the drum are one...

THE SECRET TO BEING AN AMERICAN

NASA astro-biologists have found ET life out there is much more likely than they once thought. Felisa Wolfe-Simon reports in NEW SCIENCE: "Life can survive in planets we once deemed too harsh." And while this is fascinating about other planets, planetary life right here continues to fascinate. And befuddle. Because we're still trying to understand it. Take for instance the planetary life here in the United States....

About 150 years ago a brilliant French visitor, Alex Tocqueville, found "Americans a bold, impetuous new breed." Our impetuosity intrigued him. It intrigues to this very day, for to this very day we remain a young, and therefore, impetuous people. We prefer checkers to chess, like our plays in two acts rather than three, always opt for doing more than delaying.

This quality has helped tame forests, forge rivers, conquer mountains, and find it in our heart to lavish everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Jesse James, Andrew Carnegie to Al Capone, Clark Gable to Paris Hilton, the Congressional Medal of Honor to a suitcase in a TV game show. What can I say!

However, impetuosity for all its glitz and glamor has its downside. Notice how...

* ... quarterbacks who were heroes starting the game are trade-bait bums after a loss

* ... presidents who we laud one day are losers any day they don't do what I want

* ... the news is bad for the nation unless it's good for me; when it's good for me, it's just plain good

* ... my opinions are my opinions; ignore that man behind the curtain whose column I just got it from

* ... there are only two kinds of people in the world: Americans & those who want to be Americans

Actually Tocqueville initially came here to study our prison system. Actually NASA initially discounted extra-terrestrial life. Actually most Americans don't care one way or the other about such matters, because you see we're busy doing more important things. What things...? Don't be so impetuous. I'll let you know when I'm good and ready.

THE GREEKS CAN'T STOP LAUGHING AT US

The Greeks simply don't know what to make of us. The ancient Greeks, that is. You know, the ones who centuries ago created the noble idea of honoring the best athletes among their city-state at a quadrennial Olympics. It was all about being the best-of-everyone. In America today, somehow it's become everyone-is-the-best!

Lets scan the record.

At one time there was a handful of prestigious awards. Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, Pulitzer. Now ...well, now there are awards for virtually everyone who shows up. A half dozen film awards, at least a dozen music awards, not to mention how every kid in school gets an award "for trying."

At one time there was the World Series, the Super Bowl and the Rose Bowl. End of story. But not so fast. Today, baseball and football have a glut of playoff games and specialty post-season games. While the Rose Bowl now competes with the Sugar, Cotton, Sun, Desert, and I think I heard about a new Apricot bowl.

Now you see, the old Greeks wouldn't get this. Arts and sports to them were acts of human supremacy. Not feel-good events where everyone gets a chance to be a winner. They had this alien notion that everyone is not a winner, only the winner is the winner.

Granted, that Mike Ditka mentality still prevails. Stout-hearted, hard-headed competitors still say things like no-guts-no-glory. And mean it. To them, psychological efforts to gratify the losers' egos and to find safer ways of hurting one another just don't go down well. After all, we are a nation built on the blood of revolution, cattle drives, and gunfights at the OK Corral.

Both these worldviews make good sense to their advocates. On one hand -- the Olympian ethos which honors the few. On the other -- the evocative ethos which finds as many honors as there are sincere seekers (or at least cash-paying sponsors). Boiled down to their essence, both worldviews reflect the beating heart of humanity's passion for a purpose.

Look. We came into existence...either at the hand of God or the workings of Evolution...we've grown and tried our best all this time...we've met with some successes but also our share of of failures...now at the end of the day we have this pounding need for someone in this world to look at us and say: "Well, hello there, I've been admiring what you do...!"

Cue the awards committee....

WHAT'S THE BACK SEAT GOT TO DO WITH IT?

This is as good a time as any....!

To unmask us. To look into who we really are. While we love the bold, tall-in-the-saddle legend of yesterday's Old West, we really live the careful, safe-in-my-own-room hope of today's mortgaged home. We respond to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, but spend more of our time talking to our banker or insurance agent.

Celebrated journalist H.L. Mencken snarled it best when he scoffed at our cowboy mythology of roaming the free range: "Given a choice between security and liberty, most of us will always choose security."

To test the old skeptic's indictment, consider. We spend two weeks of the year engaged in the liberty of colorful vacations. The other 50 we pay our bills on time, put on our seat belts, check our tires, take our vitamins, watch our blood pressure, bring our umbrellas, install security systems, review our 401Ks, and always lock the doors.

Not really hypocrisy. Common sense. Common sense drew Neanderthals to caves, soldiers into foxholes, and Charlie Brown into this piece of advice to Lucy: "You know what security is...? It's being a kid falling asleep late at night in the back seat of the car coming home with your parents from a long day...." Lucy looked puzzled. Charlie explained. "...and then waking up all tucked safe in your own bed...!"

Lucy reflected. Then grew somber. "But wait...! That means...?" Charlie frowned in wise assent. "Yep...that means it'll never ever be like that again...!"

While Charlie and Lucy have never grown up, we eventually did. Accepting with our adulthood all its innate pleasures and pain. However, do you ever fall asleep in the back seat of the car...? Hoping just a little that someone could still tuck you in bed...? Well, here's a secret. Bankers and insurance agents, presidents and prime ministers, idols and idiots still do too.

LETS GO TO THE MOVIES

Our movies reflect our America, and our America reflects our movies. But what's really essential is what happens when we and the movies meet.

In that other, long-ago generation, there were thousands of little neighborhood movie "theatres," strategically scattered among a few elaborate movie "palaces." Today there are neither. Instead there are hundreds of multiplexes. Sleek chrome boxes in which smaller boxes with screens squeeze in their patrons. Twenty boxes mean twenty different movies going on at about the same times. The management can move patrons in and out at an efficient pace and profit. Especially with their glitzy displays of nickle candy going for a buck, and ten-cents popcorn selling for five.

Well, those number betray me, don't they!

I'm recalling a very different milieu in that very different generation. However, it's not just the prices that were different. The experience was. Come walk with me...

No need for a car, a highway, or a crowded parking lot. Like most, my movie theatre was a few blocks from home. Usually you didn't worry about time, because you sauntered in at whatever time was convenient to you not the management. Meaning you'd watch the double feature from whenever you came in, to whenever it reached that point again. Plots were pretty simple, so seeing it from the beginning wasn't that critical. [How critical it is with today's movies is open to argument]

The point here is the warm physio-emotional way you experienced the movie. The theatre was local...the audience was local...the guy taking the tickets was usually the manager who in turn was usually a neighbor ...the venue was cozy...the seats seemed to fit you from the last time...the plot had good guys and bad guys, and usually you could distinguish...the dialog was more important than the computer...and if the story had to have villains, they were usually human not Vulcan-masked-pretend villains.

I know. Sounds like another grumpy old sentimentalist remembering things better than they actually were. But here's the catch. Maybe they were...! So just maybe today's cool could pick up a few tips from yesterday's warm.

WHO'S SMARTER AT CHRISTMAS - DOG, CAT OR US?

A team of evolutionary biologists from Oxford University recently analyzed the evolving brain size of some 500 mammalian species. They found the greatest increases in animals living in social groups. Monkeys, horses, dolphins and dogs. Not so much our solitary and independent-minded kitties.

But now on to the human mammal. Especially around the Christmas season. The season for not only taking family pictures, but taking out old picture albums. A gentle, time-lavished habit.

As our eyes travel the pages and the faces, we are meeting lives we often forget to remember. Not only the lives of long ago loved ones, but also the younger lives of those who are still with us. Now this looking warrants a second look...!

When we gaze into the eyes of those who are now gone, what do we see? We see perhaps old memories, old loves, old angers, and even old identities we can no longer name. As these long ago eyes look back at us from these aging photos, how does it make you feel? Good? Bad? Indifferent? Whatever the feeling, the fact remains. These people were once a part of your life (or at least you lineage) so it would be good to treat them with the respect they have earned in your life.

As for the young faces in these albums who are now older faces -- parents, children, siblings, friends -- there is something special going on here. They are looking back at you as you are, while you are looking back at them as they were. The moment can stir a great many emotions, for it is one more way of understanding the inexorable, un-retreatable march of time.

Families. Photos. Memories. Their momentary intersections this time of year can release even more energy than the world's enormous Hadron Collider. Yes, atomic and sub-atomic energy pools are incomprehensibly vast. But by comparison to the energy pool of family remembrances...hardly in the same league.

Merry memories....

THE MYSTERIES OF INNER SPACE

We often hear the challenge of inner-space travel being even greater than outer-space travel. Makes sense, because while the distances may be less, the depths are surely greater.

Reminiscently driving through my old neighborhood from the Chicago of the 30s & 40s, I passed a tiny fish pond in one of the backyards. Instantly a maternal memory...! When I was about nine, Mom protectively reported how "a little boy drowned in this very pond" even though it was only 18 inches deep.

She was terrified by that incident, and her terror transmitted to me. Her fear of water became my fear of water. Not her fault. Just the way it is sometime. However, on this new day I began probing deeper into my Mother's old fears. Born in the deserts of 1906 Arizona, water was a distant reality. Then at age 16, her first serious encounter when the family voyaged across the dangerous North Atlantic to visit family in Europe.

Oh, yes, now I remember...! How she would recount those perilous ocean days (it was a few years after the Titanic sank in those very same waters). One storm grew so terrifying, she recalled her Father saying, with his Arizona 6-shooter in hand, he would kill them all before letting them go down with the ship.

Now, more than 100 years after her birth and her fears, I was re-traveling that same neighborhood street. Connecting those same distant dots. Her fear of water had carried through her entire life to my entire life. Without either one of us fully understanding the process.

Yes, life is a process....! Only sometime you have to plunge dangerously deep enough to understand it. Making inner-space travel perhaps the roughest yet most rewarding trip of all. Ask your friendly family psychiatrist....!