Nobody has placed hands on me during those searches. Some hospitals require that a new admission go into a room or behind a curtain with at least one same-sex nurse or psychiatric technician. If there are two hospital employees, then one of them holds a hospital nightgown in front of the patient while the patient takes off his or her clothes and gives them to the other employee, who gives them back to the patient after checking that they don't have drugs or dangerous objects in them.
I don't like doing this. However, the conglomerate's behavior toward me has been so vicious and caused me so much stress that there have been times when my mental functioning decreased so that I couldn't do anything every day except sit, and there have been times when I was more preoccupied with the thought of suicide than with anything else. Almost all of my admissions to psychiatric facilities since 2011 have been voluntary and sought by me.
I chose to be hospitalized at those times, despite having to deal with the temporary loss of what privacy I have left to be admitted, because I knew that it was part of what I had to do to begin to be healthier. Everyone gets fatigued by too much stress; I don't think of those hospitalizations as signs of weakness or personal failure. The dangers of hospitals are another story; what they provide is safety from suicide for someone who has chosen not to die, food, sleep, and a chance to be out of your regular routine so that you can get some distance from it before you have to go back to it.
I am not someone who thinks that privacy intrusions should be part of quotidian life; I talk about my objections to privacy invasions all the time. I don't know if people who read and listen to my blogs will be shocked when I say that I don't know that it's a bad idea to require that people from the Middle East applying to live, work or study in the United States be required to have their phones, email and social media searched during the screening process. By that I mean that the phones are physically given to American personnel, with the passwords, and that all email and social media accounts and their passwords are reported to the screeners, with the understanding that withholding information about other phones, email and social media accounts will result in rejection.
This would be a temporary situation; once the electronics and accounts had been searched, the people to whom they belonged could change their passwords and the government could not continue to monitor them internally without warrants.
I don't know if that's part of the screening process already. I also am not sure how much time should be given to the electronic/information searching process; maybe something like two weeks per applicant.
I guess that I'm also not sure that there shouldn't be a limit on how many phone numbers, email addresses and social media accounts admitted people could have for a certain amount of time, or even that they should not have to register their phone numbers, email addresses and social media accounts with the U.S. Government and inform the government of changes about that information. That could also be a temporary situation, lasting for something like 6 months to a year. If you really are using your phone, email and social media to talk to friends and family, look for work and housing and get through school, you'll think of these restrictions as annoying and upsetting, but worth it to save your life.
The Internet is infinite. No other form of expression or communication has ever been literally infinite. The right of freedom of speech was not meant to prohibit restrictions on the ability to coordinate murder.
I don't think that it's right to monitor people just because they are part of congregations at mosques. That is religious profiling and will make it more difficult for moderate Muslims to defend, in conversation formal and informal, public or private, America's declaration of being a free country. You also can't try to force people away from their religion without making them angry in a way that doesn't heal.
Copyright L. Kochman, December 7, 2015 @ 3:25 p.m.
