One thing stands for certain when one is home with the crud and cannot speak above a croaky whisper: you watch a lot of television, read a mountain of books and magazines, and get really familiar with the backs of your eyelids.
While recovering from the latest and greatest epizutti making the rounds of our fair city, it was our privilege to partake of all three sickroom activities.
After a couple of days, I had heard about all I cared to ever know about the TSA’s search practices being performed at our country’s airports. Between that and all the harping about the Bush Tax Cuts expiring January 1, I have heard about all the national news I care to hear for sometime to come. For one thing, Congress may do some really stupid stuff, but surely they aren’t stupid enough to saddle the American public with exponentially higher tax bills. If they do, the resulting firestorm will make the Boston Tea Party look like Pin the Tail on the Donkey at a kiddie party.
Round-the-clock news channels have heightened the atmosphere of frenetic commentary surrounding events of the day. With the constant commentary by talking heads, contributing talking heads, and supposed authorities in a related field, failure by the viewer to pay attention to the rinse and repeat cycles of the programs and topics will yield one of two things: nerve-shattering frustration over the inability of the average citizen to do anything about the big issues of the day OR a compete resignation from anything beyond their personal property line. They don’t want or need the stress.
To further complicate the issue, now we have these guys at Wikileaks who have taken it upon themselves to inform the public with documents someone has decided tell “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey would have said, These documents reflect the inner workings of a government agency or corporate entity so the public can see the deception, subterfuge, and arrogance that define the private face of organizations we should be able to trust.
The folks at Wikileaks echo the long held belief by some in the media that “the public has the right to know.” While there’s a great deal of truth in that belief, there’s also a greater measure of responsibility that accompanies one’s mission of informing the public.
Regardless of the targeted organization, part of that responsibility includes whether release of the information will give a true picture of the inner workings of that entity.
In other words, is everything being laid out for the public to read and come to a reasonable conclusion? Or is the information being released just what the whistleblower could get their hands on? Hearing all the dialogue, reading all the communications, having an understanding of how that particular segment of activity fits within the larger framework of that organization is a critical piece to the public being able to come to a reasonable conclusion regarding that organization’s operations.
Let’s face it, we are a public that really doesn’t want to know everything — just the down and dirty. We want the bulk boiled down, summarized, synthesized, and presented to us in bullet points — not over three entries, mind you — so we can get back to whatever it is that was occupying our time before we heard about this.
We are too busy electronically papering our friends’ and associates’ e-mail boxes with urban legends about alleged Congressional actions we haven’t bothered to check out or hoaxes about somebody having been kidnapped — and we didn’t check those out either — to objectively digest the information somebody has posted on a website. Like Joe Friday, we just want the facts, ma’am. But don’t let those get in the way of a good story. We Americans are guaranteed the right to free speech, along with the right to bear arms, and others. But the question is not whether we have the right to say what we want or to keep guns to be used to protect life and home. The question is whether we have enough sense to know when to use them and when to leave them in the drawer. Did anybody stop to wonder, “What the heck is an E-3 doing with that information anyway?”
Helen Person is a Winder resident and columnist for the Barrow Journal. You can reach her at helenperson@windstream.net.
