Tracking our Every Move and Mini Rant

A few days after my niece and I spent the afternoon in a tourist town along Lake Michigan, I got a questionnaire on my smart phone from Google Maps asking me about the restaurant where we ate lunch that afternoon. It creeped me out! I hadn’t googled a map to the area or looked for information about restaurant nor did I use a credit card or my phone inside the place. It took me a few minutes to figure out that GPS must have tracked us as we walked around town and it knew we stayed inside the restaurant long enough to eat. Creepy, but on the good side of Big Brotherism if I ever end up in a swallow, unmarked grave hopefully my killer will be the forgetful type who fails to take my cell phone and I’ll be found (assuming someone misses me before the battery ruins down). And even if he does disable my phone, I have an ace in the hole. My 5-Star Emergency Responder has the same GPS tracking ability and I’m never without that tucked in my cleavage. (Should it be ‘in’ my cleavage or ‘between’ my cleavage? I hate word dilemmas like that.)

There is precious little expectation for privacy these days and that’s sad for our youngest generation who will never know what it’s like to grow up in a world without security cameras, satellite spies and trackers recording their every move. They’ll never know the silly thrill of driving to a lookout point high above where two state lines meet and standing on a picnic table mooning the people going over the bridge below. Don and I did that once on vacation in the late ‘70s but if we did it today we’d probably get arrested for indecent exposure when we drove back down the hill. To the best of my memory that’s the one and only mooning episode in my life but if my brother or best friend through grade school and high school comes along to say differently I’ll bow to their superior memories. 

Did you know you can even get GPS pet trackers with location-on-demand? If Levi was an escape artist I’d get one for him in a heartbeat---might anyway because sometimes he's hard to find in the house. I’ve heard they can even embed similar devices under the skin of children of high profile people who might be targets for kidnappers. How soon before they become acceptable to use on all kids? Tracking devices for Alzheimer’s patients are not uncommon for those being cared for at home, and the 5-Star Emergency Responder I wear was originally designed for children by John Walsh, the father of the little boy who was kidnapped and beheaded in 1974. As most people know, John went on to establish a powerful advocacy group for victims of violent crime and is the host of the popular TV show, America’s Most Wanted. I admire how he was able to channel his deep grief into something for the greater good of society. 

Speaking of courageous fathers in the aftermath of profound loss did you see Khizr Khan’s speech at the DNC National Convention? He and his wife are Gold Star parents of a Muslim-American Caption in the U.S Army who was killed in Iraq and who posthumously received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his heroism. And if you want to skip the rant portion of this blog post, scroll down to the next paragraph. Here it goes: I cannot believe that Donald Trump tried to devalue that father’s impassioned speech about his son and anti-Muslim bigotry by claiming that Hillary’s people wrote it for him. It wasn’t enough for him to go after the father, he also suggested Mrs. Khan wasn’t allowed to speak as she stood on stage because of her religion. But Mrs. Khan the next day said in an interview that she gets emotional when she sees photos of her son and when she walked out on stage there was a huge image of him on the jumbo-trons and that threw her off balance so she asked her husband to speak for both of them. Instead of ignoring the whole speech as Trump should have done, he couldn’t resist hitting back on one line in particular: “Mr. Trump, you have sacrificed nothing and no one” for our country to which Trump shot back that he made a lot of sacrifices when he was building his business empire---as if that compares to having a child come back from war in a flag draped coffin. The man only takes his foot out of him mouth long enough to insert his other foot and he’s been doing this foot exchange over the Khan’s for nearly a week now. Rant off.

There is a TV commercial I see often for a smart phone app that is connected to a motion detector and speaker for your front door. It allows you to be able to see who is at your door and talk to them from any place in the world, whether they ring the bell or not. That app fascinates me which is plain crazy, given the fact that the only people who stop by are the UPS guy, USPS woman and the Jehovah Witnesses. Growing up, though, I would have set up that motion detector near my diary. Back in my teens I used sewing thread and baby power to alert me if any prying eyes had breached my hiding places. I was never sure if it was my mother or my brother who found my diary---more than once---because they were both too cagey to crack under my cross-examinations. In this day and age it would be so easy to catch someone who invades your privacy or to tell a Jehovah Witness at the door, “Move along little lady, move along.” ©

NOTE: If anyone missed Khizr Khan’s speech, check out this story about the son’s heroism which includes a link to video of his speech with its introduction by Hillary: Click Here.