With regard to the proposed installation of “security” cameras at the Bromfield School (I place “security” within the quotation marks it so richly deserves), I agree with Paul Richards, though not for his reasons. Forgive me for having grown up in a prelapsarian America, with respect to today’s scared-rabbit surveillance society, but the issue at stake isn’t trust, but privacy, and beyond privacy the right to live anonymously, if one so chooses. As one of those redoubtable patriots of the American Revolution put it—I forget which one—he who would trade liberty for security deserves neither. I could of course Google the reference, but that’s a level to which I refuse to stoop. A subject for another day.
There’s a memorable line in the David Lean adaptation of Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago”: The red apparatchik declares, “The private life is dead in Russia!” We’re at least halfway there.
Michael Lecky
Stow Road
