"It's not that I have something to hide.....I have nothing I want you to see."

Anon is a futuristic dystopic sci-fi film from 2018 (Anon (2018) - IMDb) where everyone has a digital signature that is available at all times on society's augmented reality grid. Individuals are tracked every minute of the day, every day, on government orders, rendering privacy and anonymity non-existent. The tracking is essentially done by others around you, and is accomplished via ocular implants that record everything individuals see in order to provide augmented-reality displays to them and others.  In other words, the implants overlay this recorded information onto real-life situations almost immediately. If you see a person on the street, the overlays let you see all the digital information that exists about that person because all that information from everyone's ocular implants has been uploaded to the grid. It's almost like having a search engine in your brain. This makes policemen's jobs easier, because they pretty much already know who the criminal is immediately after a crime has been committed or while it is being committed. Policemen can tap into the scene of the crime using coordinates and gather the information that is needed; in principle they don't even need to be present. In practice, they visit crime sites in order to gather forensic clues that confirm their case against perpetrators. 

But there is a person who is not on the digital grid, a tech-savvy young woman (The Girl/Anon, played by Amanda Seyfried) whose analog life makes her invisible to anyone looking for her. It turns out that she has cleverly disguised herself in the system using algorithms that 'disseminate' information about her. It is impossible to gather a complete picture of her or to get complete information about her. Those who pass her in the street register her presence but get no information about her. She is a glitch in the system, and that makes the detective (Sal Frieland, played by Clive Owen) who is working on a series of inexplicable serial murders, curious. The murders are committed from the murderer's perspective, not the victim's, and the victims' views don't provide any information about the killer. He passes The Girl one day on the street, and when he cannot retrieve information about her, it occurs to him that she may be the murderer for whom he is looking. I won't divulge the plot or provide any spoilers, since I thought the film was a pretty good (albeit a little confusing) sci-fi film. 

But at one point toward the end of the film, The Girl says to Sal, "It's not that I have something to hide.....I have nothing I want you to see." Think about that for a second. She wants privacy for privacy's sake. She wants to be anonymous to the system. She is not doing anything criminal, she just wants her life to remain untracked, to remain outside the digital universe. She wants to be free, to say and do things without worrying that she is being tracked and recorded at all times. Although this is a futuristic sci-fi film, it made me realize how far we have come toward creating this exact society, where all of us are digitally connected at all times. We do not lead anonymous lives, nor is there that much privacy left. For example, our cell phone use provides information about our whereabouts at all times as long as we have our phones with us and turned on, which most of us do. The Alexa devices in our homes listen to everything we say and record our conversations, unless we turn off the recording function (The creepy reason why you don't want to put Alexa in your bedroom | Fox News) and Amazon’s Alexa Never Stops Listening to You | Wirecutter (nytimes.com). If you ask me, the society of Anon has already arrived. It's just that our governments have not mandated that we be on the grid if we don't want to. But we already do most of our banking online, the use of paper money has declined drastically, likewise the writing of actual paper letters. We can order food, clothing, concert tickets, and plane tickets online and never have to leave our homes if we don't want to except to attend the actual events or take the actual trips. But if the day comes when governments mandate having a digital signature, freedom as we know it will disappear forever. But rest assured, some few tech-savvy people will find ways around the system. It would be the height of irony if we begin to pay large sums of money to such people in order to return us to an analog society. We may find that an analog society is preferable if the digital one we live in imprisons us by forcing us to have our digital signature available at all times. 

One Catholic’s reflections on the sexual abuse scandal in the Church

Who knew? Who the hell knew that the Church, that bastion of all that was good and right and ethical and moral (or so we were told as children), would turn out to need a complete overhaul? Who knew that behind its closed doors, priests were behaving as criminals? No, not all of them, but enough of them to make me sit up and take notice, become angry, and demand change as of this week. When we were growing up, we would never have imagined in a million years that priests would be carrying on with young boys and girls in ways that literally make you sick to your stomach. When I read the recent article in The New York Times this past week about the grand jury’s report investigating abuse in six dioceses over a period of 70 years (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/us/catholic-priests-pennsylvania-church-jury.html), I was horrified. And then something inside of me snapped. Like in so many other areas of my life, I simply do not want to tolerate bad behavior anymore. I won’t have it. I don’t want to be lied to, dissembled to, promised to, or cajoled. I have previously done so, and will continue to, cut off people who behave badly toward me. It’s that simple. They get the short shrift. No more second chances. And that philosophy now extends to the Church. I have given the Church a lot of my time over the years; I have attended mass faithfully, and have defended the Church when I felt it was unfairly attacked. And when I was a teenager, I worked church Bingo, in addition to being a church receptionist part-time, answering phones and writing out mass cards for parishioners. I also helped the cook at the rectory serve dinner to the priests, and cleaned up the dining room and their living room afterward. I saw a lot and registered it for posterity. I see now that they were nothing more than men, human, frail, weak, and lonely. They drank, many of them heavily, they smoked a lot, and they ate too much. They were decent men, the ones I knew, with one exception (a priest who was much too interested in my sex life at that time). Many of them did not stay the course; they met women in the course of their daily life, and left the Church to marry them and raise families. I understood then why they left, and I understand it even more now.

I want change in the Church, and I want it now. I want clarity, openness, honesty, and ethical behavior. I want an end to a patriarchal, male-only culture that thrives on power, prestige, secrecy, and on keeping women out. The criminal pedophile priests were allowed to do what they wanted to do, unimpeded by the law. Had they not been priests and been discovered, they would have ended up in jail. But not in the Church; pedophile priests were merely moved to other dioceses in other states, so they could start the pattern of abuse all over again. Their abusive and criminal behavior was played down by bishops and Church leaders, lied about, and covered up. The sheer arrogance, the 'we are above the law' attitude, is mind-boggling. You need only read the above article to get the full picture. Just the fact that the Church is paying out huge sums of money to the victims of these crimes, is witness enough to the magnitude of the crimes. But how many lives did these priests destroy? How many? Even one life is too much. Parents trusted priests, children likewise. Parents even encouraged their sons to become priests--that is how revered the Church was in some families. The Church could do no wrong, and of course, when that attitude becomes prevalent, it is only a matter of time before the opposite is a matter of fact.

I want priests to be able to marry, I want the vow of celibacy to be voluntary, I want women to be able to become priests, and I want pedophile priests to be prosecuted as the criminals they are. I don’t want to listen to more promises, more speeches, more 'all talk and no action'. If the Church won’t institute some of these changes, I am going to stop supporting it financially, and I encourage others to do the same.

I am so disappointed in my Church. I grieve for the parents, children, lay people, nuns, and other priests who bought into the lies sold them by an arrogant Church. While the faithful were trying to abide by the strict and unforgiving sexual codes set down by the Church (no sex before marriage, no birth control, etc.), some priests were doing anything other than abiding by moral and legal sexual codes. They were instead criminally abusing children and scarring them for life. It is a betrayal so huge that it boggles my mind. I can never forgive these men. I keep my faith, and honor my faith, because my faith is in God and Christ, not men. I am on the fence at present about how I want to punish the Church, because it is in need of punishment. It has confessed to its crimes, yes, and now it needs absolution. In my book, that means that the pedophile priests go directly to jail. The leaders who covered up their crimes can join them there. It means paying out until the coffers are empty. It means zero tolerance for criminals and criminal behavior. It means returning to a simpler Church, without the layers upon layers of bureaucracy and career power trips—bishops, archbishops, etc. It means living simply, and it could start in the Vatican, which is in possession of treasure after treasure. Open the coffers, feed the poor, shelter the homeless, and take care of the sick. God knows there are millions of them on the earth. For example, help the Venezuelans, whose country is falling apart economically, resulting in their being unable to buy food and support their families. That is far more important to me than preaching to married couples that they should not use any form of birth control. Christ would have worried about feeding the poor and homeless. Do what Christ would have done, and would have you do. I have no stomach anymore for supporting the lifestyles of priests who drive new cars, take fancy vacations, live well, and eat well. That is not living the vow of poverty that they took. I understand that priests too need shelter and food, but they would do well to take a look around and see how their parishioners live, and adjust their needs accordingly. But it would be a moot point if they could marry and live among us ordinary souls. Then they would know what it was like to earn a living, afford a place to live, buy food, raise children, and take care of aging parents. They would know what it is like not to be able to afford a third or fourth child. They might learn compassion and empathy when they actually had to face some of these problems themselves.

I close by including a link to an article, also in The New York Times, which was a response by the Vatican to the recent grand jury findings https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/us/catholic-church-abuse-vatican-statement.html). I pray that this is the beginning of major reforms in the Church. It is the only way it can survive. The faith of its parishioners will survive, but as my father used to say, the Church is made up of men who are human. They will fail, themselves and us, in ways that Christ will not fail us. Our faith should be in Christ. We cannot place our faith in men and institutions; they betray us without compunction.