Disturbingly Quiet

    Remember a few posts ago there was a small note about the Senate removing the law that blocked access to your Web history?  In just a few days, it sailed through the House as well and in a change of pattern, without lights or cameras or reporters, President Trump signed it into law.  So let's recap on what that means...for one, the Congress that people have elected (albeit on partisan voting) have pretty much made this change permanent; that is, the FCC which used to protect access to your information can no longer add any additional laws which are similar to restrict advertisers and marketers from getting your information.  Well, who cares what you order on Amazon or whatever, you say.  But let's say that you've got a newly diagnosed medical condition --say the onset of diabetes-- and you've been researching away on your phone or tablet.  Could an insurer buy that history of your browsing information and possibly use it against you later when you apply for insurance (if, as was proposed by Congress, that any new health insurance would once again allow insurers to deny you coverage for pre-existing health conditions)...well, with the new privacy law just repealed and signed the answer is yes (insurers still --as of now at least-- cannot access your health records per se, but they can view all of your search history however you may access the Web).  So why, with all the big issues going on, would both Congress and the President take away your privacy?

    One big reason might be the power of such search providers as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T who have been lobbying Congress for ages (their efforts were defeated earlier by then-President Obama).  But again, with the power of the Congressional Review Act, a rule can be rescinded by a majority party in the legislature, although prior to this newly elected Congress it had only been used ONCE in the past 20 years.  This Republican-controlled Congress appears to be a bit different, and has already utilized the rule 11 times in the past two months alone, and will likely invoke their rescinding abilities even more.  Remove protection for streams from coal mining operations...check.  Remove protection for BLM lands that protected them from drilling and shale operations...check.  Remove protection for wildlife on federal refuges...check.  Remove education funding for low-income familes...check.  Hmm, are you seeing a pattern here?  Let's look at one more example, that of the defeated Paul Ryan/President Trump health care plan...says The Atlantic:  The ACA has tax provisions that would generate $594 billion in revenue, and getting rid of those provisions would overwhelmingly benefit the most well-off.   Indeed, the two main tax cuts—together costing $275 billion over 10 years—apply only to those making over $200,000 a year, with 80 percent of the tax savings going to those making over $1 million.  Those in the top tenth of 1 percent would get an average tax cut of about $197,000, while the top 400 earners in the country—a group of individuals who average $300 million in annual income—would receive an average tax cut of $7 million each.  Added Politico: That $2.8 billion exceeds the total Obamacare subsidies to 813,000 people in 20 states and the District of Columbia.  Throw in the "nuclear option" the Republicans invoked recently to get their Supreme Court nominee appointed --blaming the Democrats for forcing their hand on this issue because of all the filibusters-- and discover that the facts are that the Republicans invoked the filibuster 79 times in just the first 3 years of the Obama presidency to block judicial appointments, and wouldn't even consider holding hearings on Obama's Supreme Court nominee.  Now the strong evangelical views of both Supreme Court justice Gorsuch and vice-president Pence --the beliefs that government should stay away from a church's business and that the Constitution's separation of church & state should be upheld and enforced-- will ironically be put to a test...first issue up on Gorsuch's court proceedings, a lawsuit filed by a Mississippi church that it should be entitled to government funds.

   Okay phew, that rant on my feeling of party hypocrisy just needed to come out.  But wait, to those of you who feel 180 degrees in the other direction, don't flee just yet for my voice merely exemplifies a deeper divide which was captured by the recent Cadillac commercial ("We're a divided nation...or that's what they tell us.").  In the book by the young (just out of college) author, Andrew Forsthoefel, Walking to Listen, he decided to walk across the United States to find out what is really out there, who he is as well as who are these people are that the bigwigs keep saying are divided.  And did you catch that part...walks (he felt that driving caused one to miss so much, to just easily zoom past the details and become absorbed back into yourself and lose some of that everyday-person compassion).  It seemed a bit more possible that I might be able to trust someone else enough to love them someday, now that I was falling into a deeper trust of myself on the road.  I felt changed, too, by the fact that so many people had trusted me during these months, over and over again, by taking me into their homes.  I felt bigger in some way, more expansive, like maybe there'd be enough room in my life that it could accommodate someone else, too, without contracting in fear -- trusting my own aloneness, trusting theirs, trusting the space between us.  A set of my friends talked about their church now setting up roundtable discussions, two people from each designation, be they liberal or independent, conservative or agnostic; the rules were simple: no discussion, only a few minutes to present their views of why they felt as they did.  In the end said my friends, it gave them insight into why others are feeling as they do.  In his book, the young Forsthoefel meets people he didn't agree with, whose views and ways of life were far from his own; but he found them as everyday as you or me, one fellow in particular telling him the next morning that he was pretty leery of him when he first arrived and ready to jump all over him at the first wrong move or opinion, but putting a $100 bill in his hand and wishing him well for the rest of his journey, saying that he admired what he (the author) was doing and wishing he would have done something like that early on in his life.

   So despite my own ranting and raving, there's something bigger going on here, not only for me but for most of us...an opening.  This is a chance for many of us to just sit and listen, to discover and walk and slow down and to indeed look at the details.  Maybe my views of how the Republican-led Congress is voting are or are not yours, but I do think that in those politicians' minds at least, they feel that they are doing right...or at least feeling comfortable living with those decisions (and likely living comfortably as well...sorry, still ranting).  Maybe it's time to sit down at a meeting like my friends did and hear the other side, and there might be many other sides.  Here's how author Forsthoefel put it after meeting and eating with Allen, an alligator hunter in the swamps of Mississippi: Walking the country was like an exercise in taxonomy, cataloguing the varieties of the human species.  I'd already encountered so many, and would meet many more as I continued: hitchhikers and hoboes, waitresses and their regulars, road-trippers, ranchers, and roughnecks, raccoon hunters, deer slayers, hog stalkers, mothers of five and seven and ten, firefighters, police officers, professors and pot growers, laughing cowboys and solemn mechanics, the hippy-dippy ice sculptor, the drunker hibachi chef, the farmers of cotton and corn and goats, fledgling sweethearts and ancient lovebirds, an old-time bounty hunter, a small-time shrimper, a homemade-ice-cream maker and a biscuit baker and a master of crayfish etouffee, a Hopi glassblower, Navajo medicine man, a Cajun mystic, an ex-con, an ex-president, preachers of fire and brimstone, football heroes fallen from glory, mariachi DJs, a deluded messiah, cosmologists and embalmers of the dead, wannabe crop-dusters, would-be walkers, the lost, the found, the saved, the damned, and an old man on the highway called Nowhere...Of course, all these people were far more than the titles I've just given them, but that's taxonomy, finding some kind of order in the chaos and classifying it.  Why bother, in this case?  Because then an amalgam of indistinguishable faces splinters off into hundreds of millions of fragments, individual human beings.  The closer you look, the more varieties you find, and any goat-and-sheep dichotomy starts to look completely absurd.  Americans become Mississippians, who become alligator ranchers, who become Allen, who likes hunting in the swamp on his airboat at dusk and watching Deadly Women Tuesday Marathon, who believes in goats and sheep, and probably thinks you're a goat, and who feeds you a huge breakfast in the morning anyway.  Stop and slow down for a bit is all the author is saying...the devil is in the details as they say, but in this case there might be a lot of personal insight there as well.  Now, about that browser history...