The newspaper this morning tells about the death of a kid at the nearby Hutterite colony. He was assembling a bomb in an outbuilding when it exploded. Did he know too much about how to make a bomb, so that he unfortunately had the basics right? Or did he know too little, so that he wasn’t in control of when it would explode?
When I was in the ministry, I passed on in conversation the information that a woman was going to move away. She was enraged that I said this because she didn’t want people to know -- for her own reasons. Did she tell me too much about her plans? Or did she tell me too little, not also informing me why it should be a secret?
When a person enters adolescence and wants to know about sex, how much information is enough and how much is too much? Should it be fitted to the person in question, or is it unfair to either tell him/her more than friends so that what is learned becomes a source of superiority or less than friends so that he or she is the one they tease or give misinformation? How do you find out what the friends know anyway? And how do you keep him/her away from the media that is only too happy to tell EVERYTHING but in a sensationalized and corrupted way?
Obama is now wrestling with disclosure of many things, trying to find his way between his campaign promises of transparency and the new material “for your eyes only” and “destroy after reading” that only a president has access to -- aside from the people who put those labels on it after making the decision that he can read it. What do THEY know? And when do they know it? And how?
For decades I’ve carried the vivid memory of a boy in my classroom with whom I clashed. He was Blackfeet, a people who were invaded and murdered by whites. As warriors they had secrets of strategy and timing. As ceremonialists they hid both the Ghost Dance that was a source of resistance and the Horn Society ceremony that included ritual intercourse. As starved people they falsified their parentage in order to be included on commodity rolls. When missionaries went to seize their children, they lied about where they were or whether any existed.
This boy I’m remembering was desperate to keep me from controlling him or telling him things he could not stand to hear or me knowing anything about him. He shrieked, “I forbid you to look at me! I forbid you to know my name! I forbid you to even THINK of me!” Of course, his commands failed to be effective or I wouldn’t be telling you now.
Every day via spam I get warnings that people know financial things about me and offers to make sure that no one ever finds out my credit card number. For a while there, I was getting spam that wanted me to open it (so it could install secret monitoring cookies in my hard drive), baiting me with headings like : “we have nude photos of you” or “someone hates you.” Worse than words or numbers about us, we are nervous about images of us. How many people do you know who refuse to let their picture be taken? Not out of superstition like a South American Indian tribe, but out of a need to control how they present themselves.
Obama wants to computerize medical records for efficiency and accuracy. Having been a nursing home ward clerk struggling with exactly that kind of complex software, I’m suspicious. Too much depends on twitchy fingers and tired eyesight, even as the handwriting of doctors is one of the arguments for keyboarding the information. There were mistakes that were hard to find and remove. At one point in my own record, information was “migrated” from one branch of the hospital to another and mistakenly merged with someone else.
But the big argument against medical records being computerized is that they will potentially become public. Last time I applied for low-income energy assistance, they asked for permission to access my medical records. Once I went into an insurance office that had just been computerized and the dazzled insurance agent showed me the entire file of Bo Derek’s insured property. It’s so common for college records and other comparable databases to be taken home on “thumbs,” accidently published, lost on stolen laptops, that we hardly pay attention.
The real problem is not the information: it is the use to which it is put. When Bob Scriver’s insurance agent slipped the list of insured Indian artifacts the Royal Alberta Museum intended to buy to a local tribal politician, the agent unleashed an international firestorm that had major consequences, far beyond what he had expected, because he had almost no understanding of Native American politics, let alone his own jealousy.
Jack Nicholson sneered, “You can’t handle the truth,” and it’s often true. The reason usually is that to handle it you will need MORE information, MORE of a context, MORE real understanding. The cure for closeted homosexuality can only be understanding that there’s no reason to put it IN the closet. What kind of solution is “don’t ask, don’t tell?” Black boxes abound.
It used to be the “kind” convention not to tell people when they were suffering from terminal illness, so they would remain optimistic. But most terminally ill patients know themselves and can feel death approaching. It was the others who were invested in pretending everything was all right and wasn’t that a failure on their part? Isn’t the real issue control? Don’t we too often try to control by simply not admitting that something exists, like salmonella in the peanut butter and melamine in the baby formula -- tragedies based on a failure to find out? Yet the abbreviation TMI pops up everywhere: “Too Much Information.” My mother was appalled when a dying relative’s husband sent a blow-by-blow physiological description of her symptoms.
On the other hand I’ve received word of deaths without any knowledge that there was danger, so that there was no chance to say anything or become reconciled. I have a cousin who (after I threatened bodily harm) has learned to tell me what’s going on, but she says she really hates to be the bearer of bad news because she knows it will make me feel bad. To me “not knowing” is worse. On the other hand my brother would rather not even know good news. He just doesn’t want to know at all. Knowledge implies a need for response.
And then there are all those people who are afraid I might blog about them... ordinary virtuous people.
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