Visited with a friend

I needed sometime to myself and took it today, I didn't have anything important at work and just wanted to think about some things, so, I took a vacation day and laid in bed thinking until around 2. A friend called and wanted to go to dinner as we had previously discussed and we did. Later we drove by his new place and just sat outside and talked. It was nice to visit with him and later his wife.

His wife commented on how much better I looked, I had not seen her in a fair amount of time. As raggedy as I may be now, it is a vast improvement over the last five years. I think I am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. That sure was a long tunnel, lol.

Another friend of mine often reminds me of an old Chinese saying that the person who finishes a journey is never the same as the one who started it. My friend and I have both changed on our journeys, still us; but, with new perspectives. I don't know that I would have liked the younger me, I was very determined and very decisive, okay, I could be very harsh.

My friend and I talked about the world, careers and personal matters. I forgot all about needing time to myself, what I really needed was time with a friend, time with someone who just wanted to be with me, no pressure, just peace. I like peace and hate drama, I am not afraid of a fight, I just prefer cooperation.

I have been reading about how the biggest internet troll (a person who goes on websites in order to create drama) has been identified and how he promptly was fired from his job. There was also a lot of discussion about how the government asked to remove the YouTube video that supposedly upset Muslims and then there was the story about the young girl who committed suicide a week ago because of "cyber-bullying". Lots of stories regarding what should and should not be allowed on the internet.

There is a difference between private speech and public speech. There is a difference between what you say to a child and what you say to an adult. The internet is totally unregulated and people post child pornography, nobody is for that, well, very few are in favor of it. Yet, the internet is our form of communication and the question becomes will there be private areas, like e-mail or chat?

Do we believe in innocent until proven guilty? Now, do you believe that the government should be allowed to read every e-mail you write when they are the ones destroying the post office? How much do you want them to know about everyone? Would you let them monitor everyone 24 hours a day to make sure that nobody is a child molester? I want you to think about that.

It is not an all or nothing question. Where should the line be between internet "freedom" and internet restrictions. It is one thing for me to send a personal e-mail to a friend where I tell him that I have just shot up heroin and quite another thing to post it on my Facebook page. One is a private communication and the other is a public admission.

The current method, at least one of them, is that the government does keyword searches on both public and private communications, anything that used the internet. Now lets say that I sent an e-mail to a friend saying that I wanted to rape someone, would you be comfortable with the government reading my private conversation because they could investigate whether or not I was really going to rape someone? While I would never joke about rape, there are people who do and have no intention of raping anyone. I am not agreeing with such jokes, I have daughters. Still, at what point in time should the government be allowed to read my mail?

If the government had read every piece of mail since the post office was started, they could have arrested a lot of child molesters; but, we wanted to be able to discuss things with family members that the government did not read, things like when a child died or when a spouse cheated or when we made a mistake. We won't have those conversations when we all understand just how not private the internet is.