Tweeting Is A Loaded Gun

When you grow up in a small town, your entire childhood is public knowledge and will remain on a billboard, somewhere in that town, for the rest of your life _ in that town.

Because everybody does stupid, or shameful things.  In particular when we are unaware that certain things are stupid, or shameful.  (Things that our communities, our social orders, believe are shameful.)

As kids, what do any of us know about just about anything _ especially things that are shameful.  We used to joke about our “Permanent Records” when I was in school in the 50’s and 60’s.  It was a Joke.  We kind of believed the teachers and adults were keeping an actual written record of all our misdeeds, etc..  But, most of us (the brighter kids, maybe) drew the conclusion that that would be impossible.  It would be just too much stuff.  Boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff.

A written permanent record of all children’s “bad behavior”?  I screwed up 20 times a day!  I knew it!  Half those times, I knew I got away with it.  Plus being in an American Armed Forces Family, I changed schools every year _ quite literally.  Somehow I wound up in a new school every single year.  It would have been a semi-trailer truck full of “stupid behaviour” following me around.

Today, and for the last ten years or so, if you (everyone) isn’t posting a dozen or more pictures of yourself doing stuff, some CCT camera has got you.  Or, if you’re a child, your parents, or some family member, is posting pictures of you. Somebody you know, friend or foe, is commenting on something you did (or maybe didn’t, or maybe just a rumor) on some Social Media website.

Now, there is a “Permanent Record” of your life!  And, it’s out there forever AND anyone with a little tech savvy  can pull it up and will know every fuckin’ thing you have ever done!  It will never go away!  It is not written on paper, stuffed in hundreds of boxes; it is a speck of sand on the beach of the World Wide Web available and open to the world.  Using a simple algorithm  that single speck of sand can be sifted out in a nano-second.

There is no longer any real freedom.  “Time will not heal all wounds.”  Time means nothing today.  We are all chained to our pasts with chains that are massive, unbreakable and connected to anchor after anchor like Marley’s sins.   And, we continue to believe we are free. That those massive chains are invisible. “Let he who is without sin cast the first Tweet.”