The NSA Know-it-all (click to see in theweek.com)
Sooner or later, everything you say or do will be recorded. The internet, like an elephant, never forgets.
I’m sure that I could have gone far in Miss America competitions, not the bikini part of course. Nobody needs that! I mean the interview part. I’m pretty good at saying partially interesting-partially idiotic things such as these gems from listmania’s 10 (True) Stupid Comments Miss America Contestants Have Made:
“My most important role model is Mother Teresa, because she’s just so awesome!”
“No, I don’t think the Miss America Pageant denigrates women. Well… maybe the ugly one…”
“I have always admired you, Mr. Parker. Especially your drive to get dogs neutral.”
“The world would be a better place if all blind people could see.”
The need to say something is so great that a person might just blab on and say something stupid, or worse. I’ve been present when someone asked a woman who was no longer a size zero, “When are you due?” And sure enough, the woman was not pregnant. I didn’t say that awful thing, but the horror of that moment stopped the earth it’s orbit. It was a long moment, seared into my neural pathways. In that pregnant pause one could hear the angels of heaven’s choir collectively gasp. Since that moment I never comment on a woman’s pregnancy, not even a “you look great!” I imagine a day when a friend’s water might break and will be on the phone with 911 for an ambulance, and I’ll say, “Oh, you’re pregnant?”
In the Mishnah (200 C.E.) Rabbi Shimon taught the following lesson: “I was raised among the wise, and I have found that there is nothing more becoming a person than silence” (Avot 1:17). (The literal translation reads ‘nothing is better for one’s body (tov la’guf) than silence).
Yes, silence is golden. I knew that, but I forgot it a decade ago when I was asked to volunteer at a charity golf event. I’m not a golfer. The deal was to ask each golfer at the tee of the ninth hole for another five bucks toward the charity or let me, the non-golfing rabbi, tee off for the player. 
Everybody paid – golfers are dumb. In any case, another volunteer was stationed there with me and as it was, we quickly ran out of things to say. Why did I have to be leaning on the Par Aide golfball washer? Why, in that moment, did I have to be mindlessly playing, up and down, with its plunger? More importantly, why couldn’t I keep from speaking just for the sake of speaking?
“Why don’t any of these guys stop to wash their balls,” I asked? The horror on the face of the other volunteer, a woman I had never met, snapped the rewind of the previous five seconds and I realized just what I had said. Why don’t any of these guys stop to wash their balls? Did I say that? Shit!
The National Security Agency is listening to our phone calls and tracking our internet usage. Google Now (aka,Today) knows everything about us, and is learning to monetize your likes and dislikes, as well as every search you’ve ever done – ever! It seems safe to say that everything you say is being recorded and will live on forever as some horrid proof of Neitzche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence.
Woody Allen: “Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”
To my mind, there are two likely outcomes to the showdown that modernity is having between the right to privacy and the amassed personal data now available in digital age:
Just as the Beastie Boys would for their right to party, people are going to fight like mad for their right to privacy. It’s already happening. Laws for privacy will stand, but we are so addicted to what interconnectivity can do for us that we will continue to willingly forfeit our privacy.
Some people will embrace that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. These people have never run out of things to say on a golf course or have have greater powers of denial than I. They simply hope that technological security will keep one step ahead of the digital- ne’er-do-wells. It hasn’t and it won’t. The announcement that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command plans to form thirteen offensive teams by 2015 should dispel us of that naive mindset.
I’d like to suggest an alternative. We should become practiced in the wisdom of Rabbi Shimon, who taught that silence is healthy for us humans. Isn’t silence precisely the counterbalance to the pathology of needing to fill every moment with having something to say? Since the digital-age seems bent on preserving every idiotic thing we say along with the brilliant and quotable. I wonder about the moment in the not so distant future in which we have learned to accept that everything we say is heard and being recorded -will we also learn to be more intentional in what we say? Maybe then I’ll be allowed back on a golf course. Until then, the virtue of appreciating silence as wisdom is needed more than ever before.
