Essayist Ann Taylor Fleming considers the loss of privacy in our lives.
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: No question, a lot of Americans are feeling fairly prosperous. The economy continues to be good. Crime continues to be down, and except for those of us who've been El Ninoized, there's a general sense of well-being. And no doubt, that sense is affecting the tolerance for the president at the moment. People sense that what he did or didn't do, his private life is his own business. In poll after poll Americans seemed to be saying that, seemed to be maintaining their private life, even a presidential private life, is, indeed, private.
Privacy, what a bedrock notion that is to all of us, so fundamental to how we think of ourselves and what it means to be part of a democracy, where no one can invade your home in the dark of night, a sense that there is a private space that allows us to raise our children the way we wish, pray to whom we wish, love whom we wish.
Ironically, the word "privacy" doesn't even appear in the Constitution. But scratch an American, any of us regular, old law-abiding citizens, and you'll inevitably find a deep faith in the notion of privacy and a sense that it's eroding for all of us. On any given day in any of our lives there are all kinds of reminders of just how publicly accessible our lives have become. Switch on a computer and voila, there are you, your very own face on some Web page you didn't even know existed. That's sort of flattering but a little spooky, nonetheless, because you know it's just the tip of iceberg.
Within the data banks computers everywhere, your life history is for the getting. Your marital history, credit history, shopping history, it's all encoded, and there's not a thing you can do about it. And we love these things. They're our new intimate companions, our time savers and time wasters. But they are ready to yield up our vital stats to whomever should want them, a lawyer, IRS investigator, or just an eager-to-score marketer. Add to that the surveillance cameras that now stare down at us from on high. We are being watched now, recorded, in stores, on streets, even sometimes now in private homes, where anxious parents are actually installing their own surveillance equipment so as to monitor the behavior of their nannies. We sympathize, but it's weird. Add to that, of course, the TV cameras, which now also seem to be everywhere, reporters and cameras staking out courthouses and offices and homes, not to mention the tabloidians on celebrity hunts.
WOMAN: I have Tom Crews--
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: There's a general sense that it's all too much, too much hype, too much invasion, too little respect for that ever so fine line between what is legitimately private and what is legitimately public. Of course, we are not the innocents here. We buy the tabloids and the tell-all books. We bare our souls in highbrow memoirs and on low-brow talk shows. We have sabotaged in many ways our own privacy for gain and/or for safety, or expediency. Nobody would suggest what's going on in Washington isn't legally and morally complex and won't play itself out eventually. But in the meantime we're all reckoning with the idea of privacy, of what it is and what it isn't in our own life and how to preserve what's left of it. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.
