When I started writing this
weekly column about 10 years ago, I gave it this title. I felt it was important
for me, and possibly for others, to take more control over our lives, to fight
against the many forces and institutions which try, openly or secretly, to
control us.
At that time, I was not
thinking mainly about government, because I did not feel that our governments,
local, state and federal, were asserting too much control over my life.
Certainly there were actions taken by the federal government that worried me,
notably the secret
surveillance of our personal communications that George W. Bush’s
administration had set into place. A report in 2009 written by the Inspectors
General of all US intelligence agencies concluded that the program involved “unprecedented
collection activities” that went far beyond the scope of its legislative basis
and was based on a “factually flawed” legal analysis.
But I was more concerned
about how private corporations took control over pieces of our lives, often
without our knowing anything about it. Since then, we have learned much more
about the invasions of our privacy perpetrated by the giants of the digital
world, who collect information about what we do and buy, where we go, and whom
we contact, and then sell it to other corporations, all of whom are thinking
about profit.
So one way that I have tried
to maintain more control over my life, to take it back from those who want to
know more about me than I want them to know, is to keep as much of my life off
the internet as possible. I buy online with credit cards as little as I can. I
mainly use checks and cash. I stay away from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
I refuse to provide my telephone number or email address to most of the people
who ask for it as a normal part of their employers’ snooping about their customers.
I ignore the constant requests for me to respond to “surveys” about my “experiences”,
because I believe they are mainly attempts to gather information about me. I
don’t believe that I have suffered in any way from trying to retain these
aspects of my private life.
But it’s not enough just to
be defensive. To take control over our lives we also need to demand clearly
what we want. We certainly deserve a better federal government than we have
now, and that means learning about candidates, supporting ones we like, and
voting every chance we get. When we spend money, we deserve to get value in
return, and that means complaining when we don’t get it.
That brings me to the message
I just sent to my local newspaper about the unacceptable quality of what they
have been delivering to my door. I reproduce that letter to the editor here as
an example of taking back my life. I am not suggesting that you do the same
thing, although many of you live here in Jacksonville. I do urge you to be
assertive about what you deserve to all those institutions who control chunks
of our lives. Protest shoddy merchandise or service. Refuse to do business with
crooks (I’m thinking about Wells Fargo here). Call upon authorities to behave
as they have promised, to fulfill their obligations to us individually and
collectively.
We won’t always get
satisfaction. But without speaking up, we’ll get only what those who have power
want to give us, which is often much less than we deserve. Both public
government and private corporations have too much illegitimate power. Take back
your life.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
May 21, 2019
To the Editor and Staff:
In the Journal-Courier of
Saturday, May 18, the long story about the sexually abusive Ohio State
University doctor appears two times, on pages 4 B and 8A, under slightly
different headlines. That might seem to be a rare example of publishing error,
akin to a 100-year flood. Except that, like the recent repetition of 100-year
floods, I believe this is the third time in two months that the Journal-Courier
has produced newspapers with the same story in two places.
Unlike floods, repeated
instances of journalistic incompetence are preventable. Apparently, neither our
local publishers nor Hearst Newspapers care enough about producing a quality
newspaper to fix this problem. That was clear in the lead headline on page 1,
where “musuem” was spelled incorrectly.
Is this related to the
reduction in local content over the past year? Has some financial statistician
at Hearst discovered that a local newspaper does not need local content or
careful production to make money? Is that all that matters in Jacksonville
journalism any more?
We subscribers deserve
better. In exchange for our money, the Journal-Courier now guarantees to
deliver the paper by 6 a.m., and claims to want to “be the undisputed news and
editorial leader in West Central Illinois”, speaking “intelligently”, and
embodying “the highest principles”. I don’t know what they mean by those words.
I would like my subscription to pay for a promptly delivered, carefully
produced and thoroughly researched daily newspaper that tells me things no
other newspaper offers. What is happening in Jacksonville? What is happening in
the rest of the world that we in Jacksonville should know about? What do people
in Jacksonville have to say?
Only Hearst and other
newspaper conglomerates are getting rich by journalism, by robbing us of the
richness of good journalism. Generations of far-sighted Jacksonville newspaper
people created a tradition based on other ideals. Is that going extinct, too,
like our natural world?
Steve Hochstadt
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