Luminous Darkness

What are the values that we are allowed to profess in American society today? According to this Op-Ed piece by Tom Krattenmaker in USA Today, the answer might be different than we tend to think. He says:

I am a values voter. Given my progressive political and religious beliefs, some might find this a dubious claim — especially members of the Christian right, who with their rhetoric about “values voters” suggest that only those who share their positions on abortion and same-sex couples possess something deserving of the term “values.”

He goes on to describe a number of values that come straight out of Christian gospel principles including social justice, peace-making, poverty relief, environmental preservation, and tolerance. These are values that I, for one, certainly hold deeply and they do come in large part from my Christian faith and belief in following the way of Jesus. The public perception of Christianity has been hurt in our country by idea that only a fundamentalist has the right to use the language of ‘values’ in public discourse, but nothing could be further from the truth. Towards the end of his article, Krattenmaker concludes:

As progressives wield language that once belonged solely to conservatives, may we do so fairly, in a way that acknowledges that the other side of the debate also has values. In so doing, we’ll model other core values of ours: inclusiveness and respect for differing viewpoints.

Amen to that.

I have been spending the last few months in a place where high-speed internet access is not a given, as it has been in the university communities where I had been living for the last nine years. Needless to say, I had gotten used to such a service, and tend to take it for granted. So, I have been on the hunt for free Wi-Fi. The city of Pittsburgh, where I currently reside, is a bit behind the curve in terms of wireless access, especially for free. There is a short list of places downtown where I can get online, but most places that have wi-fi are businesses such as Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, which do not provide the service for free. I remember being in New York City, and almost anywhere in lower Manhattan one could open a laptop and find half a dozen open wireless networks.

However, this brings up an interesting question: Is it ethical to use someone else’s free and open wireless access point if they have not explicitly stated that it is available for public use? I am referring in general here to private networks, usually in people’s homes that they either do not know how to secure or can not be bothered to secure. Many people, I am sure, would say that they have no problem using these networks (and I should say up front that I am, for the moment at least, one of them), but there are some questions here.

One image that I heard recently was the scenario of someone leaving their front door open. Would it be ethical for you to go into their house and watch a DVD on their television? I would say, probably not, as the open door is not necessarily an invitation to use their personal property, especially since this situation carelessness rather than consent is probably at fault. In the case of wi-fi, on the other hand, it is more likely to be indifference at work.

This is especially true because it is unlikely that the person with the open network will ever know that you have connected, especially if you do not use a significant amount of bandwidth that might slow their service down. If they do care, it is fairly easy to secure any wireless connection with a password, and as far as I can see, the burden is on the provider to secure their connection. After all, once the radio waves leave their property, you are just accessing a public resource.

So I would conclude that although it is probably ethical to use a wi-fi network that is unsecured, one should probably not use it excessively, and, if you are feeling guilty about it, see if you can find out whose network it is (probably a neighbor that you might even be friends with!), and let them know and ask their permission.

We had a chaplaincy film night this evening at one of the colleges that I work for where we viewed Snow Falling on Cedars, an excellent adaptation of David Guterson’s novel of the same title. I would highly recommend both the both the book and the film; the former for its flowing poetic language and intense detail and the latter for its hauntingly beautiful cinematography. The plot concerns the death of a fisherman working off the coast of a small island in the northwestern United States, but much of the story takes place during World War II and revolves around the many Japanese-Americans who were sent to internment camps for the duration of the war. There are those would probably like to forget that we locked up these people, the majority of whom were American citizens, for no other reason than their ethnic background, many of whom had in fact been born in the United States, the children of Japanese immigrants.

Two things were particularly striking about the short discussion that we had afterwards with some of the students who had watched the film. First was the fact that none of them had been aware of these American internment camps. Now, to be fair, these were British students, and I have already learned in my time here that the teaching of American history in this country is spotty at best. (In fact, the teaching of history here is not very good generally as I seem to have learned more about British history than many university students that I have met!) However, as the camps are a piece of American history that I certainly learned about in school, it was fascinating to hear the reactions of these students upon learning about it for the first time. As the film makes clear, this is still something that it in some ways still an open wound in the hearts and minds of many Americans.

The other thing of note in our conversations was the parallel to many events that we have been seeing today in the wake of the war in Iraq and the terrorist attacks of September 11th. While both the novel and the film tell a story about America’s past, it is clear to me that this is a piece of our history that we have not learned from. We have detained a number of American citizens over the past few years, without trial, for no other reason than that they have Middle Eastern ancestry. George Santayana’s famous quote is perhaps too much overused, but there is definitely truth to it:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I am concerned that we are in the process of repeating a part of our history, and doing so because we are not teaching people about it – perhaps even denying that it happened so as to ease our consciences. If even students at one of the best universities in the United Kingdom have not heard about these events, can we really assume that the majority of Americans are aware of them either? This kind of thing should not have been allowed to happen in the 1940’s and it should not be allowed to happen today. We must remember and learn from our history, no matter how painful, since we already seem to find ourselves repeating it.