Privacy, blown away

Today I visited Moore, Oklahoma and saw the destruction that the F5 caused firsthand. I had lived in Oklahoma all my life and I had never seen a tornado in person. I had never seen destruction like this. I had read the stories about having a home being ripped to shreds and lives following suit. I had read lots of them. I had seen big storms causing destruction, damage. I had seen lots of them. I had never seen the wrecked inside of peoples’ kitchens from the street. I only saw that in Moore.

It is widely accepted that tornados cause damage to more than just the physical structure of buildings. They can damage deeper, more intangible things. Yeah, everyone gets that. Something I saw that nobody had ever told me about; something I never considered, was the privacy that so many people lost. The inside of a kitchen was visible from the street, opened from the side like a dollhouse. The physical shell that they had built around them was open for all to see. Cleaning a house-turned-concrete-slab, finding personal items, piecing together a mental picture of the people that lived there, was one of the awful effects of a disaster like this. It isn’t supposed to be like this, normally you are invited into someone’s home. They allow you to see into their private life, past the exterior that is really only meant for others to see; into the interior where only the trusted few are allowed. Now, they have no choice but to allow others into their personal lives. They must allow others to see what was only meant for them to see. The ideal of privacy must be left behind in a situation like this.

It only takes the possibility of an intrusion of privacy for people to readily denounce a product. Just look at the reception of the Xbox One or Google Glass. People are worried about the very idea of devices that could possibly send personal information to any company. In Moore, Shawnee, and other cities affected by the tornados, this sort of concern for privacy is a relic of a bygone time.

These people have had their lives blown wide open. It’s not only a matter of physical loss or the loss of personal objects, it is the loss of privacy.

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