Political Thoughts

I spent this weekend with my parents in celebration of my mother's birthday. I'm sure it is terribly bad form to reveal a woman's age, but my mother just turned 55. She's counting down the years and months until she reaches the number of points necessary to retire with maximum benefits under the State's compensation plan. My father already reached the maximum number of points to reach his maximum level and retired right afterward. That was 2 years ago, and since, he's been working another job (working at getting a second pension is what he calls it).

Well, this weekend, I had two interesting conversations with my parents. The first was a conversation regarding immigration policy and the second was a conversation about an Anti-Crime System I've been playing with in my mind.

The issue of immigration policy came up while we were running some errands out on the town on Saturday. My mother was getting a new pair of glasses out at the mall, and while she was getting them fitted, my father and I waited outside the store. As we waited, a group of young ladies passed nearby, speaking Spanish. My father's comment as they passed deeply shocked me and (sadly) made me re-evaluate my father's politics again. He said, "You know, I miss the days when an American could be in his own country without having to listen to that gibberish."

Wow.

I protested that his statement was deeply tainted by xenophobia and prejudice for people of a different ethnicity, and it only seemed to encourage him to expound more deeply on his views. He continued on, suggesting that we ought to close down the borders and eject all of the non-Americans. As he said this, he pointed out people he identified as 'non-Americans,' and it was disturbing that he pointed out only racial and ethnic minorities (who are quite likely citizens of the United States). He seemed uninterested in listening to objections to his views, ending our brief conversation with the statement that he thought we ought to re-establish the racial proportions of the 1950's in the United States today.

While my father is a decent man generally, occasionally his racial politics reveal that there is a side to him that I have a hard time acknowledging. Finding fault in your parents in that fashion is a hard thing to confront. It's like finding out that a parent was adulterous once or went to prison once or something like that. It happens in other families, but to find out that something like that happens in your family... Well, it removes the ideal light in which you see your parents. They suddenly go from being larger-than-life figures to being simple humans, no different - and maybe a bit better or worse - than yourself.

The other conversation I had was with my mother (whose politics are far more green and far more socially progressive). We agree on most substantive issues, but differ only in our general respect for freedom. She's the classic liberal democrat, and I'm the classic hard-line socialist. My idea was to implant in each newborn infant a tiny microchip with GPS tracking capacity. You could have each microchip send a signal to a computer database that tracks each person's movements around the United States.

The benefits of such a system seems to be obvious to me. No more do we need to worry about an escaped prisoner. We'll know exactly where he is at any given moment and can pick him up quickly. With as many child-abductions as we find ourselves in the middle of, think of the advantage of being able to track down the child within minutes of being notified of the abduction. And more the point, we'll be able to know who the abductor is simply by seeing which GPS signal is accompanying the abducted child. Deadbeat dad skipping from state to state to avoid child-support? Not a problem. We can track him down in seconds. If someone is murdered in their home, police normally have to interview witnesses, scour the crime scene for forensic evidence, and engage in serious detective work just to discover some likely suspects. With unnerving frequency, there isn't enough evidence even to make a list of suspects. With this system, you could simply find out all of the people who were in the house between given times, when they arrived, when they left, and where they went to afterwards.

It seems that the large objection to this is based in the doctrines of privacy (in which I am deeply skeptical for philosophical reasons). But if we are overly concerned about the privacy, simply seal the computer database. Make the information contained within the database subject to a warrant requirement. Keep the 4th Amendment requirements for warrants. If a cop wants to find out who was in a particular house between 8:00 pm and 10:00 pm on January 22, 2005, make him prove to a judge why he deserves to have access to that potentially sensitive information. If we aren't hesitant to put wiretapping and search powers in the hands of a judge now, why should we become hesitant to put a similar power in their hands? If anything, such a power allows for far less intrusion into individual's lives than the power of a judge to authorize police to enter your house, rifle through your belongings, open your drawers, read documents on your computer, or listen to late-night phone calls between lovers. All a GPS system gives is location of the individual. While this is, indeed, sensitive information, surely allowing a police officer access to a person's private diary is more of an infringement on privacy than knowing that they visited a movie theater yesterday.

I may be a totalitarian, but the importance of this idea is that I think it can be integrated into modern American jurisprudence without significant legal alterations to the status quo.