It was just a normal school day in Lebanon. I don’t remember the exact date but it would have been sometime in the late 1950’s. An office aide entered the classroom and I heard the teacher call my name, asking me to come to her desk. She had a strange look on her face as she told me to go to the principal’s office with the aide.
Never in all my years of school had I ever been sent to the principal’s office. I was too scared to even wonder what I had done wrong as the office girl walked me down the hall.
Once inside Mr. Rainey’s office, I saw a couple of people standing there including a strange man dressed in a dark suit. I remember he looked rather ominous.
He asked me my name and when I told him, he handed me a post card, asking me if I had ever seen it before. I recognized it as a card I had sent a week or so before to The Daily Worker, the newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, asking them to send me a couple of issues of their paper.
I acknowledged that I had sent the card. He asked why. I explained that I was writing a report for one of my classes and I had chosen to write about the Communist Party. This was in the middle of the Cold War period and even back then I was very much attuned to political issues.
I had always been very competitive about my grades, so I had “googled” the Communist Party and found out about The Daily Worker. Just kidding, there were no computers, no Google search engines back then. Doing research meant going to the local library and perusing recent issues of the Reader’s Guide, an obscure digest of periodical literature, with print even smaller than the directions on the present day medical bottle.
A couple hours of work might yield enough resource material for a presentable school research paper, but after getting those citations, I had to find the actual newspapers and magazines to locate the pertinent article. That meant having the librarian take me back into the archives to dig through dusty stacks of material. But again, no copy machine back in those days so I had to take tedious notes on each article in longhand.
It was not easy work, but the anticipation of getting the highest grade in the class was worth it. Plus, truth be told, I’ ve always loved doing research. Tracking down clues and putting the pieces together is just way too much fun.
So I tried to explain all this to the unsmiling stranger in the principal’s office, who I later found out really was an FBI investigator apparently intent on ferreting out a secret Communist cell group in Lebanon Missouri, led by a skinny teenage girl, as I was back then. But that’s the way it was during the McCarthy era in the 50’s. Everybody was guilty until proven innocent.
Apparently my teachers were eventually able to allay his fears by convincing him I was just an innocent student who tended to be an over-achiever and not a threat to the U.S. government.
So I was “let go” after my brief and sole encounter with the law.
I ran across that essay recently (yes, I really do keep everything), and smiled as I remembered the incident and noting I did receive a very good grade on it.
I’ve thought about this so much recently as every day brings new accounts of the government spying on us, through our smartphones and computers and other electronic gadgets. I’m not paranoid about it, although I did cover up the camera lens on my new computer with black tape, just in case. I”m not so concerned about anyone discovering any deep secrets, since everything I’ve ever said or done is in writing somewhere, but I would hate for anyone, even my worst enemy, to see me the way I really look when I’m not out in public.
Although I must admit I was somewhat taken aback when I turned on my computer Wednesday morning to see all kinds of birthday cakes and candles and other birthday decorations across the top of my Google page, with a birthday greeting overlaid across the top, and my name was even spelled correctly. And yes, Wednesday was my 71st birthday. but I really didn’t expect Google to acknowledge that.
This week’s big spy story is that the government through the National Science Foundation is preparing to spend one million dollars tracking “tweets” on Twitter, looking for messages of “hate” and “misinformation”, which opens up a whole new can of spyworms.
I don’t use Twitter so the issue is not relevant to me except it raises lots of Constitutional questions about freedom of speech. And that concerns me. I do use Facebook but I have already resigned myself to the fact that the government already has a sizeable dossier on me, including my various rants and raves.
And, by the way, if the National Science Foundation is looking for “misinformation”, I would suggest they start with the White House Press Secretary, and press releases put out by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, right on up the line to the misinformed and/or uninformed crafters of the President’s speeches, which scroll right up and off the ubiquitous teleprompter screen.
That screen reminds me of the old fashioned player piano roll with the same words and platitudes coded into it which just scrolls right on through only to appear again the next time it is turned on. The words are just as rambling, the phrases just as pointless, the promises just as meaningless as the last time, regardless of the configuration of the platform and familiar podium.
But I guess as long as the teleprompter player rolls on over and over, we are safe. Nobody’s listening anymore, even the National Security Agency.
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