Apparently this was all the person was buying - which in itself leads one to wonder what his 4th of Juiy BBQ is actually going to be like. But that isn't what struck me as most relevant. The picture was taken by someone else and posted to the Internet.
My first thought was "is this an invasion of privacy?" But a moment or two of thought leads clearly to the conclusion it was not. The hot dogs an Vaseline were clearly visible to anyone in the store, including the other customers and the check out person. The fact that we all get to be in that same check out line for this moment in time captured in a picture is irrelevant.
This got me to thinking about the traffic and crime cameras going up around New Orleans:
Traffic and crime cameras.
I was driving with a friend the other day, and he commented about how he didn't like the traffic cameras. He thought they were an invasion of privacy. I asked why he thought that way, and he said because he is getting tired of "big brother" watching your every move.
Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.
Let me digress for one moment: Janis and I have traveled all over the U.S. in the past year. In every city we see rampant abuse of the yellow caution light. These people take the above quote from 1984's Starman very literally, and I must admit, it is a pet peeve of mine.
I really am sick of everyone treating life like it is their own personal "me" decade. What happened to simple courtesy? Yes, we are all in a hurry - but those stop lights are there for a reason. When you run through an intersection when the light is red you endanger yourself and others (at worst) and at best, you delay the normal flow of traffic, delaying everyone else's life in the process. As Spock said: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.
OK - so like I said, I was driving with this friend of mine who feels traffic cameras are an invasion of privacy. I asked him "do you think it is OK to run a red light, or to speed up when it is already yellow if you absolutely know the light will turn red before you get through the intersection?" He said "no, of course not."
I then asked him that if a police car was present and saw the vehicle go through the intersection illegally, would he think it is a good thing or a bad thing for the policeman to pull over and give the driver a ticket. "That would be great," he said. "We need more police doing exactly that to cut down on this sort of thing."
You know where I am going with this, don't you? By the end of the conversation, I had made the case for traffic cameras. First of all, they only take pictures of offenders, not every car that goes through the intersection. Next, they really are like having a policeman at that intersection 24/7. This frees the police up to do more important things, like - oh, I don't know - catch bad guys with guns?
The same is true of the crime cameras. These cameras aren't peering into your home, examining what you do behind closed doors. They are out in the open, taking pictures of people doing things in public. They are seeing no more or less than what anyone else might see with one exception - they do not rely on human memory in order to report what they see. They are no different than the hot dogs and Vaseline. If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. If, for some reason, you feel the need to do something wrong - do it behind closed doors, not in public.
The moral of the story, boys and girls, is this: in this day and age, the details of your life are available to strangers in so many different ways. The beauty of this is that it allows us all to bask in our individual uniqueness - and that is the part of this new age that should be embraced. We have the choice to learn about others in ways that were never before possible - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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