No opinions

I'm flying home from a week visiting Marie, and I heard an announcement at one airport: "This airport uses facial recognition software. Please remove your mask and look straight into the camera. If you prefer not to use this software, please speak to a gate agent ahead of time."

Am I crazy that this worries me? It's not like the use of facial recognition software has been entirely benign everywhere else that it has been introduced. (*cough* China! *cough*) There's an argument that I have nothing to worry about, so long as I do nothing wrong; but to assume that no innocuous actions will ever be reclassified as "wrong" is to assume a level of virtue and probity in every single one of our elected and appointed officials which seems ... I don't know ... maybe "optimistic" is the gentlest word to express what I mean.

Also I wonder if this is the wave of the future? Will it become universal? I suppose I could always stop traveling by air if I don't want to deal with it. That sure sounds practical.

Of course my defense in cases like this is never to do anything overtly non-compliant, and to rely on being boring. Not only do I try to avoid doing anything non-compliant, but I try to avoid doing anything that calls attention to myself at all. And I never express opinions. 

Hmm, maybe that last isn't quite true. I have plenty of opinions about the right way to do the work in my profession, for example, and I'm not shy about sharing them. I have opinions about the movies I've enjoyed, or haven't. But these kinds of opinions are boring and fundamentally trivial. What I avoid expressing are political opinions.

I don't remember when I started suppressing my own political opinions, but it was very long ago. Partly it was because I never bothered to get as well informed as my politically-committed friends; so if I ventured the beginnings of an ill-formed thought about this or that issue, they would reliably pounce on me with facts and figures I'd never heard of. I learned it was easier to shrug and say, "I don't know much about that. What do you think?"

When the boys were growing up, I deliberately never told them how I voted on important issues or who I wanted for President, because I wanted them to think about the issues without any undue pressure either to agree with me or to rebel against me. Wife showed no such hesitation, to be sure, but I still thought it was the right thing to do. But this decision merely confirmed a silence that had become pretty much universal anyway. Oftentimes the people at work all tended in one direction, while my friends and family tended the other. My own opinions were never anything like that uniform, nor were they always consistent. There are hot-button issues where I started off thinking one thing and have come to believe the opposite by mulling it over many years.

And I don't want to upset the people I am close to. Marie and Debbie, for example, have both been consistently far more worried about masks and social isolation and staying current with their COVID-19 booster shots than I have been. I try not to bring the subject up, or else I try to deflect it. If one of them asks me point blank whether I am current with my boosters, I shrug ... and smile helplessly ... and admit to a certain level of lethargy and forgetfulness. In fact I've come to think that the benefit of the boosters is ambiguous in anyone who is already largely healthy in other ways; and since every human activity involves risk, I'm unconvinced that the ambiguous benefit outweighs the nonzero risk. But if I ever said this directly to Marie or Debbie, I'm pretty sure I'd hear no end of ranting in return.

I've started rethinking other political issues, too, where they think we agree. I won't say a thing.

On reflection, Marie and Debbie are both very judgmental, though their personal styles are very different. But then so were Wife and D. It looks like I am attracted to judgmental women. Maybe that's because I see it as a sign of strength, and I appreciate strong women. Or maybe I never really thought about it clearly before stumbling into one relationship after another.

Oh well. I'm over sixty now. I probably won't have a lot of time for any further relationships, so I may as well find a way to make these ones work.

It helps that I have no opinions.