Glad to Be Here: A Personal Opinion on the Abortion Debate

Me, aged 2

For most of my adult life I have lived with a strange, indescribable feeling. It is something that pops up now and then, swirling around in my subconscious making me pause and reflect. You see for as long as I remember I have known I have been adopted. There is of course nothing odd or unusual about adoption. In fact I find it one of the greatest things a person or family could ever do, to bring in to your home a child and give them unquestionable love and care. I will never be able to convey the huge gratitude to my parents for what they have done for me for the thirty years I have been on this earth and for sticking up with me.

However that is not the strange sensation I feel and wish to explain to you all. It is something else, which has been accentuated by current events at home and in the United States. Basically I keep thinking that if abortion were legal when I was conceived, what would have become of me? For when the Eight Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland was being voted upon that constitutionally banned abortion, I was by then undergoing the process of adoption as a sprightly, over-active 6 months old baby. Being completely honest I have never felt a desire to discover my biological parents, a decision I made on my own. They have always been without question Margaret and Joe who adopted me. However at times I keep thinking about what were the choices and ideas my biological mother had when she was pregnant with me. Was she a young mother, maybe unwed in a still at times puritanical Ireland? Was she someone who just couldn’t afford to bring up a child?

What to do with an unwanted pregnancy is one of the toughest, heart-wrenching decisions a woman has to make and is never taken lightly. If Ireland had abortion in 1982 when I was conceived, could I have become just a statistic in a clinic; having never had the chance to take my first steps, go to school, see the world and become the man I am today? It is an unexplainable concoction of guilt and fear melded with other emotions that has always been in me. What has made me write this little piece was to convey a personal opinion on the abortion debate that swirls like a tempest right now here in Ireland and in parts of the United States.

Now you might think from my perspective that I am anti-choice or to use jargon we hear in the debate ”pro-life”. I am not. Nature has created a situation in which a woman bears the weight of conception and gestation. A woman, like a man should have the right to determine what they want to do with their bodies, whatever that may involve. I know some rabid anti-choicers will jump at me for having some sort of twisted hypocritical view of things and my reply to that is, funnily enough, it was the “pro-lifers” who led me to this view.

My dad Joe and I

What I see today is an argument blown out of proportions, fuelled by the most vicious animosity I have ever seen. But what has sickened me the most has been the actions of some of the anti-choice faction here and in the US.  In America anti-abortion is I feel the last vestige of a conservative agenda in decline after the battle against such things as gay marriage have been lost in the arena of public opinion. In Ireland in many ways it is the same. I have no doubt the people who are anti-choice have strong convictions in their belief against abortion but it is misguided and has been hijacked by an abhorrent minority that has pushed many like me who in their minds could be persuaded either way in to the pro-choice camp.

What I see now is the demonization of the woman who decides whether to terminate a pregnancy or not; a woman in need of help, advice, care and attention. No one, man or woman, regardless of their situation should be made to feel this way, to be branded a murderer or criminal for making a decision over their own bodies. Countless hours and vast resources, mental and financial have been wasted over the years in basically assailing women. But attacking the only person naturally capable of bearing the child is utterly misguided because fundamentally it is about the woman. To force a woman to have a child is a monstrous attack on personal liberties plain and simple.  To do this to a woman pregnant due to incest or rape, prolonging for nine months that attack on someone is unfathomably sickening and inhumane. Yet today this is what is happening.

We live in a world where protecting the unborn we cause mental and physical harm to others. In any other situation it would be unquestionably wrong but to even have a hint of a pro-choice agenda you are fair game to have bloodied dolls resembling fetuses mailed to you, to be physically attacked or unjustly made in to a pariah. This makes me seethe with anger. In the very act of trying to save some humanity you degrade it with actions like these. Now I am not letting off the hook some of the rabid pro-choice campaigners but the actions of a small minority who are against abortion have led me to be pro-choice but within some parameters.

I will admit, I have for a very long time been sitting on the fence in relation to abortion, not just because of my own personal experience that I gave earlier. At conception, some form of life is created but it is not whole. Until that fetus can live independently from the mother it is ultimately up to the woman, that individual whose body the fetus can only survive on to decide. I therefore am in favor of term limits after which abortion should not be allowed unless the woman’s life is in danger.

With my parents and sister, August 2011

But what this whole argument needs is greater understanding of the whole situation, the creation of an environment for a woman to be given proper care and consultation on options. My biological mother if abortion was legal could have terminated me and I live with that feeling all the time. I am glad she did not. I hope that she was given the proper care and advice, told that she could give the greatest gift imaginable to others such as my mother and father, Margaret and Joe. Sadly we are living in a time of budget cuts to welfare to help women make the proper choice, actions ironically enough taken by politicians who are themselves against abortion.

This debate is not just about abortion. It is about pregnancy, about choice and understanding of which abortion is just one but very important part. We need to look beyond abortion and allow pregnant women to have a conducive environment to decide what is best for them. I’m obviously glad my biological mother never decided on abortion but I respect her, like others to make that choice and we should be doing more for women to make that big decision rather than throwing weapons at them and at each other.

Argentina: An Observation

When a bunch of trees on the main street of the capital city become a major political talking point, either the news has become rather dull with nothing of merit to report or something odd is going on. In Argentina, nothing is ever ordinary, from the overly plastic celebrites on their version of Dancing With the Stars to the exchange rate of the peso. This is the country where old ladies walk their dogs on the street at 3am on a weekday night, the steak on your plate is the size of a small child and no restaurant website contains prices because they go up so quickly and at a rate no one, not even the state knows or admits to knowing. For some foreigners this can seem exhilirating but at the same time it grates, making one age quicker than they would normally do. Yet somehow Argentines seem to revel in it.

Argentines are people of extremes; hot and cold with a distrubing penchant for a kind of masochism for faulty things that rather than fixing them would find more pleasure in the the act of protest, the white heat of emotion than the cold, calculated need for collective consensus and planning.

It was less than thirty minutes after stepping off my plane I came in to contact with this side of the Argentine psyche. As the airlines disgorged their passengers, many of them locals with oversized bags full of electronic goods their government had tried to discourage them from buying at home with import restrictions, the crowd slammed head on into the painfully slow queues of customs. Literally hundreds of people were met with just four x-ray machines as if a storm surge came in to contact with an impregnable dam. People packed up in lines that swirled around the baggage claim area for hundreds of metres like a drunken snake. It was 9am and after an overnight flight lasting 14 hours I was not prepared for the electric atmosphere that resembled a football match. People screamed, shouted and slow-clapped at the indifferent and lazy customs officers who grumpily barked at you to put your bags through the x-ray machines. There were no riots but certainly irate people yet strangely it almost felt like they were consumed in parts by the whole experience. It seemed like the frustration emitted a pheromone that the locals just could not get enough of, one that certainly I was not affected by as I grudgingly and quietly slugged along in the queue.

This was not something new, a product of increased passenger numbers with no increase in supply of customs officials and machinery. It has always been this way. They say the British love queuing but in Argentina it is warily a part of life, an inevitability like humid summers in Buenos Aires. It is to be expected but no one can do anything about it but to everyone else who is not from Argentina would certainly beg to differ. They will moan and complain yet nothing will change.

Argentina has successfully made itself an image out of not changing. Buenos Aires is the city of “Faded Grandeur”, a place that in parts resemble Belle Epoque Paris with a metro over a hundred years old that until recently ran on one of its’ lines the same clickety, wooden cars that swooped through its’ tunnels upon its inauguration in 1912. History abounds, looking forlorn and lived in without the spruced-up chocolate box look many other cities around the world have created of their architectural heritage. In that one can find charm but also something more sad and symptomatic of inherent problems in Argentine society.

Glamour and decline on Buenos Aires Metro

In a society of so many extremes, there is no middle ground. You are either a Boca Juniors fan or supporter of River Plate; a Peronist or not. In the 19th century you were either a firm believer in a strong, centralized state or for a loosely federal nation. There was and to many extents there still is no middle ground. Consensus is an alien term, bereft of the passion and conviction of taking sides. It is here that lies the handicap of Argentine society that has hobbled it for generations and to this very day. It manifests itself in the strangest of ways but has distilled itself in to its finest form in the politics of the nation.

From the fulcrum of the Argentine Congress and the Casa Rosada, the official residence of the President of the Republic, its’ tentacles latch on to a constellation of issues and grievances. The fate of some trees on the vast expance of 9 de Julio, the widest street in the world become pawns in a political struggle where environmentalism is just an excuse for lobbing another political bomb at the opposition.

Each side has at its head a charismatic leader, someone who fights tooth and nail for the cause, who advocates an existentialist fight where you are with or against them. If against you are a dangerous threat and must be eliminated. All this passion feeds the masses who lap it up and come under its spell. A strike by border police hints a government official is akin to a coup, the end of support of a major media group for the president results in legislation to break it up. From each side the leaders stand on their podiums to berate, instill fear and galvanize their supporters. It is almost theatrical if it was not so damaging. All the time any concept of the middle ground is evaporated in the heat of the political fire from the extremities. Politics is made on the foundations of consensus, without it, the edifice of the nation slowly crumbles.

Argentines are consumed by the drama of protest

Argentina seems to be thoroughly engrossed with its own personal theatre while its neighbours slowly and calmly move on. Many of its South American peers have had a similar history to Argentina yet have in the past twenty years taken a different path, one where the hard work and the building of bridges is bearing fruit. On a recent trip to Santiago I was surprised by how different it was in Chile. Basically things worked while in Argentina they did not. While both have grown rapidly over the last decade, the physical product of that effort is to be seen in Chile with clean streets, extensive, modern infrastructure and a city one feels safe in. This is to be contrasted with the shoddy, dog excrement-strewn and at times dodgy streets of Buenos Aires, full of tragic looking old buses, unkempt and old highways and a metro that until very recently was a neglected relic, incapable of accommodating the increased passenger numbers.

In Argentina’s closest neighbours; Chile, Uruguay and Brazil; the bitter divisions of the past have been constructively tackled and an air of consensus has prevailed. In Brazil, former president Luiz Inacio da Silva, an ardent left-winger worked closely with other parties generally opposed to him in Congress to create a consensual framework to reduce poverty and harness the wealth of resource-rich nation. Working together is not seen as denying the original cause but a means to move forward bit by bit. If the United States wanted to see the effect of a polarized and divided political establishment, it would find a chilling example in Argentina.

This drug of drama intoxicates the nation and handicaps it while its’ neighbours move along the steady road of progress. While leaders galvanize hearts and minds over nonsensical and trivial notions and the people pleasure themselves masochistically over the products of their failures of crumbling infrastructure and indemic corruption, a nation which a hundred years ago held so much promise and was the fifth richest nation in the world continues its slow decline. As much as Argentina needs a big slap truth, it continues its own dance. Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that “reality is not always probable or likely”. Maybe this Argentine had his country in mind. It certainly feels that way there. 

Congress Supported Terrorism This Week

Neil Heslin and a photo of his son murdered at Sandy Hook testifying in front of a Congressional Committee

It really was a tale of two cities in the US this past week when the effects of terror played out in front of us all to see. While one showed the powerful and admirable resources of the state in hunting down and capturing dead or alive of the perpetrators, the other showed the mind-boggling failure of a bunch of egregiously self-centered elected officials to pass legislation to help prevent the recurrence of a kind of terrorism that affects the country every single day. You can all guess that the first city is Boston and the tragedy of last Monday’s marathon bombing. The second however is not just one city, but nevertheless is epitomized by the horrific murder of twenty-six people, mainly young children in Sandy Hook late last year. It is in fact every city in the United States, from Boston to San Diego and Seattle to Miami. It is the kind of terror borne in the barrel of a gun and played out in the homes and on the streets of the United States that has taken the lives of over three thousand people since one man walked in to that elementary school in mid-December and proceeded to murder everyone in sight.

I am in no way trying to belittle the shocking deaths of three people and the maiming of nearly two hundred more last Monday. Both examples I have taken are of violence a government, an elected representative should do their best to make sure never happens again. But I couldn’t control my rage looking at the result of the Senate vote where a bill to implement background checks on gun buyers was defeated in a 54-46 vote. It stunned me and then hearing the voice of Neil Heslin, whose six year old was murdered in Sandy Hook, my emotions went from overwhelming sympathy to a personally previously inconceivable sense of anger that has led me to write this article. I am not alone. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a woman who miraculously survived being shot in the head at point blank range at a mass shooting a few years ago penned a heart-wrenching piece on the failure of the vote on Wednesday. It was not a lament but the combination of anger and frustration of a woman who fought for her life after being shot and tried her best to prevent that from happening to herself and others again.

The result of the vote has been spinned by all sides of the political spectrum but I want to make my feelings on it clear and simple. Both Boston and Sandy Hook are examples of terror and therefore in my mind terrorism. While one will result in the full gauntlet of the state security apparatus being implemented which will affect every single individual in the country; from increased patting down at airport security, more intrusion on our privacy and the curtailment of liberty, the other will allow a tiny minority to go about and buy weapons to kill any individual they want with the flimsiest (if any) restrictions. And they do it every day.

Now one can go on about the semantics of terrorism. It is a word saddled with fierce emotion and like many words is almost a term for a whole spectrum of ideas but is dominated by a certain kind. Boston is an example of what we take for granted as terrorism. But what do you call the actions of a gunman in a school, the fear in the hearts and minds of young children as their teachers barricade doors from an evil man and tell the kids they love them so the last overwhelming thing they sense before death is not the brutally sharp piercing of a bullet in their bodies as their lives wilt away? This is just one example. What is it called when someone walks in to a cinema and proceeds to shoot at innocent people watching a movie? The list goes on. The actions are not just to kill but to instill terror.

On Wednesday, Congress prevented the curtailment of a form of terrorism that happens on a daily basis in the United States. It was a bill that was supported by ninety percent of Americans yet it came down to the opinions of a simple hundred individuals in the gilded halls of Washington. In failing to pass the most basic forms of background checks, something even prior to the tragedy of Sandy Hook that brought about the bill in the first place seemed common sense; these fifty self centered puppets of vested interests failed a nation and its people, not to mention the legacy of those children who lost their lives in December. They have taken the survival of their own political lives over the survival of countless thousands who in the future will be murdered in cold blood by guns. It is not just about the children of Sandy Hook, but of future children who will grow up to take a gun and shoot dead the innocent future children of others in the United States.

While Boston brought to us a form of terrorism we have not seen in the United States for years, many of us and most certainly a lot of lawmakers fail to see the terror the unrestricted use of guns has on a nation. Nevertheless it is a crime that politicians have not been accounted for in their failure to prevent from happening on a daily basis. So with the same determination they have shown in the past in preventing traditional terrorism and the unity of belief after Boston, they must do their upmost to prevent people from killing and maiming innocent citizens with guns.

Album of the Year: Father John Misty "Fear Fun"

Fear Fun

It takes a lot for me to fall head over heels for an artist or album. Granted I obsess about things such is my nature. However I never thought I would become a caricature, a decidedly over-aged frenzied version of some tween girl at a One Direction concert screaming “NIALL! NIALL!” But in a way I became just that one very wet November evening in the Workman’s Club in Dublin when at the corner of my eye I saw Josh Tillman or Father John Misty to use his quirky new moniker. There he was, finishing a cigarette less than ten metres away and seemingly about to disappear downstairs to prepare for his gig we had come to see. I was overcome with the most visceral urge to scream out his name like someone seeing their child walking on to a railway line before a train. And I did: “JOSH! JOSH!” I didn’t want to run over screaming and pin him to the ground like some lustful teenager, but that could have easily happened. As I slowly walked towards him in some sort of trance I probably did look that way to him. There then proceeded the most excruciating conversation of my life where before I had out of control vocal chords I was now tongue-tied, hand out to shake his with the marbled-up line of “Manchester last night? Cold? Thanks, see you”. It was an awestruck stupor, something I had never experienced before. I’ll never forget the horror and bemusement on Josh’s face and if he ever reads this, forgive me. Next time if you don’t already have a restraining order against me, I will be much more relaxed, agreeable and buy you a drink.

It goes to say that something must have caused me to have been infected by this man and his music. I had listened to one or two of his albums he had done under his own name and they were intricate, heartfelt, really beautiful pieces. I had listened to the Fleet Foxes, the band he played drums for a few years until very recently. Then back in May I had somehow stumbled upon the album Fear Fun not knowing who the artist was. It was a Father John Misty and after one listen I was enveloped by this strange all-encompassing feeling. It was like I had fallen down a rabbit hole in to this new world of lush sounds and fabulous, eccentric characters, laced together by haunting pianos, yearning guitars and a voice that sounded like it could tell a thousand stories. You felt like Josh was taking you in his hand, with a Jameson in the other and walking you through this land he had created, introducing you politely to all these wonderful people he had picked up along the way, a family of beautiful oddities.

Josh Tillman a.k.a. Father John Misty

Josh had left the rain-sodden Seattle, packed his bags and headed south to the warmer climes of California, took a ton of mushrooms and pondered writing a book. I don’t know if he ever got around to writing it but this album certainly feels like a novel. It is positively exuberant in sound and imagery. The feeling of sunlight cakes it sonically. Like a flower he opened up and a new beauty was there for all to see.

I never seem to listen to lyrics. Maybe it is my seeming ADHD, being all about the beat, the beat, the beat but I was always drawn to the lyrics in this album; quirky, sincere with a strong hint of romanticism to them. Then there is the music, a constellation of emotions woven through twelve songs, each seemingly a unique chapter. The twinkling cymbals and eerie piano in “Nancy from Now On” tickle you like sunrays through the leaves of a tree on a warm summer’s morning. In “O I Long to Feel Your Arms Around Me” it is like you have entered a solemn wake with Josh pining for someone lost. There is the noir-ish moodiness of “This Is Sally Hatchet” and finally that guitar in his most noticeable song “Hollywood Forever Cemetry Sings” It calls you to attention from the first few strings at the same time slowly meandering through your mind. I was hooked.

I should not have fallen for this album. It just wasn’t me. It was like when you have a certain type of guy or girl you like, your eyes are always locked on to that person in a bar or on the street. Yet at times we all seem to fall for someone who we would never ever thought about. They come out of nowhere and just have something about them that grabs you and before you know it you can’t get enough of them. Fear Fun is that for me. It is stand alone a fantastic album that is wonderfully accessible but that something something I feel for it made it by a long stretch my album of the year. 

Film of the Year: The Queen of Versailles

The Siegels, David and Jessica

It was all supposed to be completely different, an insight in to trashy conspicuous consumption. The year was 2007 and it seemed we all had money, buying cars and second homes on almost limitless credit. Economists called it the Great Moderation as interests rates stayed low and banks lent money to everyone. But there was nothing moderate about how some of the wealthy blew their cash and this was to be story about one family, a billionaire David Siegel, his wife Jackie, their kids and their plans to build the largest private residence in the United States. It would be called Versailles, inspired by the great palace of Louis IV but this was to be no modern replica. At 90,000sq ft, it would be a grotesque monster, a temple of questionable taste and bling, smothered in gold paint, tacky chandeliers and marble, the latter totalling $5 million alone. We were to be regalled, horrified and have our suspicions confirmed that some people have more money than taste.

Then in 2008 for most of us, the world went belly-up and even some of the super wealthy lost everything as lifestyles, built on shoddy foundations of loose money came crashing down. The Siegels, whose fortune was built on the somewhat dodgy business of timeshares saw their fortune virtually depleted by over-spending on a product people no longer had the money for. Drowning in debts, it became a contemporary story many of us today suffer of having to cutback on expenses and the possible loss of the roof over our heads. Versailles would become locked in by banks, left to stand an empty shell, a sad, empty shell.

We were supposed to hate the Siegels, like we take pleasure in reviling reality TV show stars. The larger than life Jackie (in more ways than one after obvious plastic surgery) would be the obvious victim of scorn with her trashy perma-blonde hair and trips to McDonalds drive-tru’s in her limo. Yet somehow The Queen of Versailles became a tragicomedy, almost heartfelt as the Siegels coped with losing virtually all their nannies for their army of children and pets. Soon pet lizards were dying from neglect, forgotten for days by a troup of children used to having everything done for them. Having taken private jets for years, their is excitement and bemusement at flying coach on a normal flight to visit family. At a Hertz stand in the airport Jackie asks “where is the driver?”, much to the shock of the Man behind the counter.

Jessica outside the unfinished Versailles

It is not just the story of a rich person over-leveraging, we hear of their driver owning nineteen homes and faced with banrupcy. As Jackie returns to her hometown to visit a friend she hasn’t seen in nearly twenty years, she is struck by the fact her friend is about to have her home foreclosed for a menial amount of money. She privately makes a cheque to the bank to help her old friend keep her house while she herself could lose hers.

The star of the film is most certainly Jackie with the looming, ghostly edifice of Versailles lurking behind. For a person who can so easily be caricatured, we find a woman who actually really loves her husband thirty years her senior, who cares for her family and even though threatened with losing everything, this apparently intelligent woman with an engineering degree just keeps on smiling, musing of the benefits of a smaller home and more normal lifestyle, one she was born in to. It is with this gusty, friendly aspect to her that we learn to love her.

Even though we are witnessing here in the Western World the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, there are strangely very few films, fictional or otherwise that relate to it. There have been some that tackle the issue of banking and its part in creating the recession. Unlike films from the 1930’s there are not many films that consider the hardship people are under these days. Maybe we are a lot more insulated by better welfare and anaesthetized by distractions such as Facebook and X Factor. The sight of economic hardship such as hungry masses queing up for soup is not as prevalent a sight as it was eighty years ago bar say the tragedy unfolding in Greece. While many of us live through financially existential threat, The Queen of Versailles is an entertaining and at times heartfelt story of our time. For that reason I have voted it my best film of 2012. 

The Shocking Delusion of the NRA

NRA's Vice Executive Chairman Wayne La Pierre

Even in light of the tragic events that struck a primary school in Connecticut last week, the media and America were not expecting from the National Rifle Association’s first public statement since the atrocity to result in a major change of policy for the gun lobby. Some had hoped that the overwhelming anger of the nation in reaction to the barbarous massacre of over twenty children would in some way pull them towards a somewhat more conciliatory stance about the issue of gun control. Indeed several hard-line gun supporters in Congress, some even in the past the recipients of campaign money from the NRA had sensed the fury in the media and the streets. Greater gun control would be an immediate issue for legislation by virtually all politicians. Instead there was bemusement and horror at the strong defense of the NRA by its Executive Vice President Wayne La Pierre in a tough statement to press Friday afternoon that was not proceeded by any questioning by the media.

In essence it was a cold condemnation of a constellation of maladies in American society, from violent video games, the care of mentally ill people to the media and political groups in Washington. Guns were only a factor in that there were not enough armed people in the primary school to defend against a mad man bent on murdering children. It was an astonishingly deluded set piece from a well-paid suit in the safe confines of a Washington office. It was far removed from the outpouring of grief taking place only a few hundred miles away as some of the victims in their tiny white coffins were laid to rest after having lived only a fraction of the time Wayne La Pierre has.

The simple fact is that in the United States over 12,000 people die every year due to guns, from misuse of the weapon to cold-calculated massacres. In some states it is frighteningly easy to walk in to a shop and buy guns that have no purpose in defense and are designed solely for effective destruction of a target or targets. No matter how one can argue that a gun is a means of defense, it is in the exact same amount a means to maim and kill. The NRA on Friday even advocated for the introduction of armed guards in to all schools in America.

Let’s just take a moment to think of this stupidity. First of all, not all massacres occur in schools, although the most shocking of them have occurred in places of education, such as Virginia tech and last week in Sandy Hook. However this past year saw mass murders in a shopping mall, a cinema and in recent years in work places. No place is safe when there is a high prevalence of gun ownership. Second of all, even with armed guards, there is no guaranteeing children will be safe when confronted by people brandishing multiple assault rifles. In 1999, two students embarked on a shooting spree in a high school in Columbine, a school that had armed law enforcement agents on call at the time. The presence of armed guards failed to prevent the death of over a dozen people that day.

It’s almost funny if it wasn’t for the context of the statement that a lobby with strong links to the tax-cutting and government-slashing Republican Party that the issue of cost and who would pay for armed guards in places of education, estimated by some to be almost $7 billion a year was not even considered in that statement. Nevertheless maybe it is my own feeling, writing here in the safe surroundings of Ireland but a school, especially a primary school should be a sanctuary. It should be a place where children are not instilled with fear by armed guards every morning. That a culture even has to consider such an issue is a sign of moral failure.

As a person who has dedicated eleven years of my life to people with intellectual difficulties I was horrified by the statement that the government should create a database of the mentally ill in some sort of twisted attempt to prevent mass murders. We may never know what exactly went on in Adam Lanza’s head that morning but to correlate massacres to the mentally ill was extremely blunt and disgusting. Not all multiple gun murders are caused by people the NRA would classify the mentally ill although the biggest have indeed been the result of people of questionable mental health. But that ignores the multiple murders on a Baltimore street corner over drugs or the murders caused by someone just blindly angry and taking it out on someone like their boss or spouse. It only takes one person, insane or otherwise to turn a gun on someone else.

Implying the need of a national database for the mentally ill is a gross stigmatization of people who truly need our help. To put mentally ill people in to a database like criminals or pedophiles is a horrifying concept smacking on fascism and a breach of fundamental privacy of innocent individuals.

That the NRA took issue with violent video games was bizarre. Those games they castigated are festooned with mass murder by the things they hold so dearly: guns. If guns were not so prevalent to begin with, the close correlation between fantasy and real world would not be there. Furthermore one must look at the society at hand. Video games are played universally but it is only in some societies that the debate concerning violent video games and murder is a major concern. In Japan, a nation whose explicit porn and violent video games are well known, there is virtually no gun crime. When you allow easy access to guns, it is then when the bridge between fantasy and real life comes close to allow things to get out of hand.

Many were left speechless by Friday’s press conference by the NRA. For a moment I certainly was, it was truly that breathtaking. Whenever a massacre occurs in the United States caused by guns, the NRA is cocooned in the surreal land of lobbying, far removed from the scene of the crime. It is not Wayne La Pierre’s six year old daughter being laid to rest this week, a few days before Christmas. It was not his son maimed and paralyzed for life while watching a film with friends. It was not his wife or child caught in the crossfire of a drug war. It was a shocking speech laced with arrogance and denouncements. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” he said. No, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is to never give him access to the gun in the first place. 

Instagraming Privacy

Once there was a time when people bought records and CD’s. We slaved in lowly part time jobs to earn the cash to go to that temple we called Tower Records and buy that album we had lusted over for many a week. Then came this anarchic upstart the Internet and it gave us new tools with which to slowly break down barriers and do things such as share music with each other without paying. Soon a whole generation was brought up imbued with the sense that music should be free. The music industry, lobbyists and politicians scrambled to keep up with the blinding speed that the Internet was changing our lives. The world wide web, just a little over twenty years old now still to this day challenges engrained rules and perceptions.

What were once walled edifices of copyright content and privacy have come crashing down or have slowly eroded away. While it refashions beliefs and organically creates a new culture around it we are challenged by rules and assumptions fashioned from another time. Things we took for granted are no longer there or have mutated. The crisis the music industry first had to contend with wrought on by the Internet ten years ago is similar to the crisis of privacy individuals have today. Copyright content we once paid for was given away for free through file-sharing. Now personal content that we created ourselves freely would be sold to make money and with it questions of privacy and what is considered private content not to be sold to individuals and groups wanting it.

The trading of personal information, from web-browsing patterns found on cookies to created content is a huge business. For over a decade Google has been at the forefront of this, using the information of users to fashion advertising more related to the person using their search system. During the recent presidential election, huge sums of money was spent by both campaigns to what they termed “data-mining” to micro-target possible voters. Your Internet usage is now a commodity that many people unwittingly know is being traded.

However it is in the realm of social media where the biggest consternation is unfolding. Websites such as Facebook and Twitter are closed environments, restricting the information that can be accessed and sold to prospective data-miners. That is not for want of trying as this week’s events prove. Earlier this year prior to its flotation, Facebook bought Instagram for a cool one billion dollars. The price seemed like one picked out from the sky, such was its stratospheric valuation for a company that allowed people to take photos in different styles and hues. Facebook has given a reason somewhat for the high price by announcing an update to the photo-sharing company’s privacy policy allowing it to sell users’ photos to advertisers without notifying them. Facebook has been under pressure from investors and shareholders to ramp up revenue from advertisers since its flotation and the popularity of Instagram and the data reamed from interactions with users seemed like a sure bet. That is until questions of privacy blew up in their faces as social media went in to a frenzy over the possible use of personal content and threats by many to boycott Instagram until the changes in privacy policy were revoked.

The issue at hand is that the Internet has broken down barriers and a new environment where things once private could be disseminated and thus fair game for people who make money from that information. The old walls of intended or unintended privacy have been pried open by the Internet and created a strange new world. While people feel they have a right to send and disseminate certain material without prosecution, information they thought was private before due to circumstance was now through simple, hidden things such as cookies, available to others and sold for a price.

There is no doubt that the issue of privacy is central to the debate about the good and ills of the Internet. Where legislation has failed to catch-up, it has been left to companies themselves to manufacture what they consider private or public, thus creating confusion and at times fear of personal violation whether justified or not. Companies themselves have created an environment of what they consider to be fair game in the selling of personal data that is in conflict with what individuals consider, just as Internet users changed their opinion about the rights and wrongs of sharing of music online ten years ago. Many jurisdictions have been moving towards creating regulations in respect to Internet privacy with the European Union and its multiple political organs mainly at the forefront. Earlier this year saw the passing of the Data Protection Directive regulating what data can be processed and sold to other parties. However the process is a slow one and considering very few people saw the power of social media five or six years ago, the issue of internet privacy will continue to be debated as the evolution of the Internet continues and permeates our society even more. The fear is that before strongly enforced data privacy laws are fashioned, a new culture of acceptance of data-mining and the misuse of personal information becomes so commonplace that a new culture where the majority don't consider it a major issue. Just as people in some countries resign themselves to the fact that their politicians are corrupt, the lack of enforcement will reduce people's desire to fight back in the future. If that is to occur basic privacy is diluted for the next generation. When that happens, industry rather than the individual will benefit.