PASSWORD, DAMMIT.

Picture a little old lady pounding out a daily blog in her back bedroom while trying to keep her cats off the keyboard.  Two open cases with her Internet provider, which is the local telephone cooperative, operating an aging telephone system.  Connection is with DSL, which is not ideal.  It is valuable because it connects 911 quickly (I have needed that service) and because it works when the electricity is off.  (The electricity is owned by a North Dakota corporation and is often “down” — sometimes literally poles and lines on the ground — because of high winds, extreme temps, and long distances that are hard to maintain.)  The phone is in a different room than the computer, which techies don’t grasp.  They only know their own familiar lives.

So I’m 78 and not “up” on current slang let along tech jargon.  I listen slowly because I have to think what is meant.  But when they become condescending and begin to explain basics with boilerplate, it’s worse.  The techies seem to be under thirty, talk really fast, don’t like to move their lips, and are from other parts of the country.  I’m learning to use email contacts with techies instead of the phone, unless it’s an immediate problem.  (It could be worse — I could be a techie trying to explain the new world to a little old lady.)

I have two on-going and evidently insoluble problems.  One is blocklist, sometimes called blacklist, which might just be a mispronunciation or might be something more ominous than “blocking.”  There are more than 800 companies that maintain blocklists, which means that people can’t call in and you can’t call out.  One doesn’t know about that status unless one uses a formal service, which providers are slow to tell you exists.  Providers want you to think that you are safe because of something they are doing directly, not that they are contracting to another business, far away.  I just now learned about whitelists, but can’t use them because I have no password, and unless I have a previous password, I can’t have a new one.

The other issue is related but not the same, and that’s the war over passwords with Google, which insinuated itself into my local internet provider so that I have to use my GooglePlus password to get onto my regular email.  (My local provider doesn’t believe this.  They say it is impossible.)  I want to cancel my account with Google but am afraid it will also cancel my 3rivers account or at least require a different 3rivers password.  So I call my local provider to find out what my password is after I’ve cancelled Gmail.  They won’t tell me.  It’s a secret because of security.  I guess they’re afraid I might send myself SPAM.  So I take a risk and cancel GooglePlus.  I haven’t had an email since, but that’s not unusual on the morning after a holiday while people are clearing their inboxes.

I’m considering asking Putin what my password might be.  Trump claims Putin will know.  (That’s a joke.  I’m finding that people can’t tell jokes from what passes for reality.  But that’s a different problem.)  

Inventing new and more complex passwords for every transaction becomes a time-consuming and imagination-challenging project.  I’ve used all my pets, teachers, favorite books, playmates, and even Blackfeet words, though that’s tricky because it’s an oral language and no one spells them the same way.  (In Canada the word for the tribe — Siksika — is translated as Blackfoot.  Up there Piegan becomes Peigan.)  I designed a form for noting passwords that I keep in a binder alongside the computer and try to keep updated.  It’s 25 websites per page and there are six pages.  I don’t do games, databases, or any other fancy stuff, but I do stream movies all evening.

I’m a writer, so I use the Internet for research, to send queries and to share writing.  My primary venue is blogger.  I do not understand the relationship between blogger and google, so I use tumblr for backup.  I once had an adventure with the spoken word for posts and might renew that.  But basically I just spend the first half of every day composing a thousand word essay to post.  Every day the same thing the same way on the same schedule regardless of holidays.

But techies want bells and whistles, and the front office wants new and exciting features that will appeal to the advertising demographic which is certainly NOT little old ladies who are easily confused when the entire starter page is reconfigured to accommodate new features, like the demand that one make one’s blog post “pretty” and appealing.  I barely figure out how to change the photo in my heading, and they invent some new thing.  Then, when I’ve become dependent on their automatic re-sizing of image feature, they drop it.  (Which is separate from the issue of which images you can use and how to certify they are legal.)

All these services appear to be short on techies and using lesser skilled people all the time, because the ones that really KNOW have moved to San Francisco and are living in someone’s closet while waiting to catch a unicorn.  (This is not a joke.  It is a figure of speech using techie jargon.)  They cannot conceive of an internet user who is not on a cell phone that will convey “texting” and who is not using a handheld device.  They also have no mental image of thin infrastructure support out on the prairies and in the mountains.  Only cities on the coasts count.  (The Lake Michigan coast counts which is lucky for Chicago.)  In tolerable weather people in Valier are often standing on their porches in order to get decent cell service, even though there’s a tower right next to the grain elevator.

But at the same time the sheer numbers of users go up and the variety of kinds and levels of sophistication go up.  The only people who really understand all this are adolescent hackers.

But my Luddite orientation is sometimes lucky.  A few years ago I began to understand how fragile the supposedly invulnerable Internet really is, partly because the original design of World Wide Web has been co-opted by major providers trying to monetize everything by gating (the stinking passwords).  Therefore, since last summer I’ve been spending hours a day downloading and converting to print on paper everything I valued.  Since I sometimes write with another person and consider some of that material invaluable — precious — it was years of chapters and discussion.  As we age, I’ll try to find a reliable archive for the materials in case I die or the house burns down, but I can only hope they won’t re-digitize everything.  The academic world is now as turbulent as all the rest of the planet.  WHAT Ivory Tower?

MIDDLE CLASS CHILD ABUSE

Most representations of child abuse (and to some extent domestic violence) tend to be portrayed in terms of drug-fueled degenerates or else debauchery among privileged high status power players.  There’s little discussion about ordinary respectable-seeming hard-working middle-class people and what makes them either use physical punishment inappropriately or sexually abuse children, their own or those of others, without ever admitting to themselves or others that they are doing something wrong.  

(I want to make a side-remark that a large part of the criminal under-class has all the earmarks of the respectable middle class: hierarchies, careful management, enforcement of standards, prosperity -- they’re just antisocial standards that support criminal activity by a kind of in-group.  Not all of it is as dramatic as a TV show, and in fact, flying beneath the radar is one of their values.  The crimes may be entirely on paper, but -- in terms of the larger culture -- as destructive as shooting people.  Within the smaller self-contained group, this is simply what "our" people do.  No guilt.)

Much of what supports and even encourages child abuse is old-fashioned ideas about discipline.  I remember complaining to the parent of an unmanageable boy.  The father sighed and said,  “All right, I’ll beat him again, but I don’t think it will do any good.”  It didn’t.  And I had never suggested such a thing.  But clearly the father thought he was obligated to do his part and had no argument against it.  This was a white family, nothing remarkable about them.

Prison punishment, 1912

High School punishment, 1950's  (a reenactment at the time)

Contemporary sharia law

Calvinist religion put much emphasis on punishment, ultimately God putting individuals into eternal burning hell.  In those days power was raw and torture was considered effective.  Diluted versions of those assumptions hang on in our own ordinary government and -- secretly -- in full intensity.  The ancient grisly practices persist in all their intensity in individuals and the Middle East.  I will point out that in Africa the present tin god authorities were taught by the overseers of Empire, right down to amputation of hands and feet.  (Look up Leopold II of Belgium).   In unsophisticated parts of the world, some people confuse intense religious devotion with a kind of merging with God, which means trouble for the “children of God.”  People still say "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and really mean it.

"Board of Education"

In my own family my humanist father was a spanker -- I’ve explained that this was related to pre-frontal cortex trauma that let anger get out of control -- but my mother used a switch on my bare legs hard enough to make stripes.  My cousins on both sides deny any such thing and I never witnessed any of them “getting a licking,” but I don’t think my parents ever punished us in front of family or neighbors.  My parent generation was moving “up” from the farms, as were the majority of people as the cities of today formed.  They were used to managing animals by using a switch or whip.  Children can seem pretty much like little animals.  I can’t remember anyone in the decades after WWII getting upset about corporal punishment.  Schools all had wooden paddles.

In rural and small town settings, a “front” of respectability is key to success to the point that one of the most destructive byproducts of any sort of deviation from the accepted code (alcohol, gambling, promiscuity) is the enforcement of secrecy, esp. on the children.  Given serious problems, family members will be separated from outsiders.  Even in country days, even with the reluctance of small community institutions (school, cops, government, church) to get involved, kids could let information escape that would punish the adults.   My country cousins were not allowed to tell how much acreage or how many cows they had.   Business is a poker game.

The counter-advantage of those places was that relatives could be a buffer who intervened for children in a quiet way, an advantage lost in the anonymity and mobility of the city.  No one would even necessarily know how many family members there were, so a missing kid might go unnoticed.  The more force is used to keep secrets, the more secrets there are to be kept.  The more hard work is needed for survival, let alone upward mobility, the more stress there is.

In places where men do hard life-threatening work, alcohol is often the buffer that makes their life bearable.  Strangely, littering with the empty cans is more frowned on than when, how much, and where they were emptied.  Drinking can be seen as an entitlement of management, a tool for deal-making by administrators and legislators, a bonding mechanism among CEO’s.  Alcohol is entwined with athletics as a source of identity and being “number one.”  Both beer drinkers and wine drinkers indulge in beverage snobbery.  Every movie shows big shots sipping whiskey from cut crystal glasses or lovers holding champagne flutes.  Putting an age threshold on drinking has made it a potent symbol of adulthood.

Now to add the element of sex.  It is generally agreed that much sexual abuse is not about the act of coitus, but in the imposing of authority, the assumption of privilege, a defense against the perp’s own weakness, frustration. and self-hatred.  Sex is the core because it is violation of intimacy, the most protected of our inner selves, replacing it with ownership, stealing our souls from us.  Of course, the perp gets nothing.  Not even an illusion.  Which is why he returns.  Alcohol is a way to undermine resistance if you don't have access to date-rape drugs.

Sex has been a highly tabooed aspect of life, controlled by the notion of marriage which muddles entitlement with ownership while pretending it's about love.  Few taboos still remain unexploited by the media.  Men with an uncertain sense of their own life will be drawn to transgression, even within their own family.  In fact, the incest taboo may add an extra kick rather than a restraint, the smugly risky feeling that they can get away with it.  A little child who can’t yet talk won’t tell.  What damage can it do?  No marks on the body.  Deep marks on the formation of the child from inside.  And economic motivation for everyone to look the other way because it is dad who pays the bills.

Violence even to the point of death and sexual misuse are biologically deep in humans (those apes), and no culture yet has succeeded in controlling the forces entirely, though we try in many different ways.  Probably the real maximum of protection is equal economic safety, which is not possible on a planet swept by drought, hail, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, catastrophic fire, and so on.  We have not solved the problem of territory- or identity-based wars. 

So what are we to do?  If we are trying to develop a “better” civilization, then clearly secrecy and neglect are not the answer.  They only perpetuate what we’re trying to get rid of.  As we grow more able to understand and address the individual human brain, more possibilities for healing and protecting develop in our groups.  Institutions are changing in response to what science tells us about the cosmos, the planet, the other life here including microbes.  Less force, more strategy, better patterns for the creation and care of children.

The persistence of species is based on the conservation of behaviors and ideas that help humans survive as both individuals and groups.  We can make pretty good guesses about what will be “conserved” but we may be wrong.  It may be that those who are willing to get drunk, rape children, set cities aflame, kill, cheat and steal, will be the ones who survive.   That’s sometimes the way it’s been so far.  Roll the dice.  Before we run out of air and the oceans become vinegar. Otherwise, why survive?