President's Message

  Someone to watch over me .   .   .  

     About 25 years ago while I was attending college in Idaho, a young man rented a room from our landlord for the summer. He was not a student but someone traveling through town looking for work. He seemed relatively normal and polite on the surface but we came to find out some things that at the time we thought were odd. Although he told us his name he never presented any formal identification. By the end of the summer he was off to another town and we never saw him again.

    He told us he had no driver’s license, no social security card, and would never give any information that could be used to trace him or his whereabouts. He would only work for cash and at the time we came to think of him as a big conspiracy theorist, black helicopters and all that, so we were pleasant but kept our distance in case he had a Rambo moment. It’s been a long time since I’ve really thought about him and quite honestly I can’t even remember his name but once in a while some of his paranoia comes back to my mind.

    When I first discovered Google Earth a few years ago I thought it was great. It was fun to look up my home and see the pool in the backyard or look up the house where I grew up and see it on satellite photos but then I started thinking about it. The government can’t seem to control the flow of illegal immigrants or drugs across our borders but they can see me swimming in my pool from space. What a chilling thought. There is always an uproar, with good reason, when politicians start talking about a National ID Card. From history we read that when the social security number was first issued citizens were told it would never be used for identification. Try and get by without one now. As conservatives we are against invasion of privacy. We don’t want people knowing too much about us but I’m not sure that there is much left that they don’t already know.

    I was born in a public hospital so they know where I was born, how much I weighed and who my parents are. They know my blood type from when I had some surgery on my finger in college. They know who I married from my government issued marriage certificate. My children all have social security numbers because they make sure you have applied for them before you leave the hospital. My address is well known from the phone book, membership lists, church directories and school registration forms. Obviously they have my phone numbers from the amount of mortgage solicitations I get on both my home and cell phone. They know what I purchase from looking at my credit card statements and they know how much I make from my tax returns and bank deposit slips. To prevent losing my computer files they want me to download them over the internet to a company that will keep them safe for me. I received a 10-12 page business census form from the government a few years ago. They wanted to know my sales volume, how much I spent on materials and many other probing questions that bordered on company trade secrets. At first, I threw it away and ignored it. Pretty soon, I got another copy in the mail asking me to fill it out. Again I threw it away and again I got another copy in the mail outlining the financial penalties and jail time I could get if I didn’t fill it out. I called my Congressman and Senator’s office for advice and was told to fill it out. I eventually did.

    My wife bought me an Apple I-Phone for Christmas and it’s a lot of fun. There is a GPS function that with the click of a button can show a dot on a little map and I know where I am. I just wonder who else knows where I am. Where do personal liberties end? Sometimes I wonder just how off base my old roommate was in his thinking. You know the old saying, "Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you."
     

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