In the lower left corner of my screen I have the Windows Taskbar. When I click it suggests different shutdown options:
Switch User
Log Off
Lock
Restart
Sleep
Hibernate
Ah, if it were only that easy! On the keyboard and over the mouse keys I have a monopoly on decisions, but in the realm of reality I can barely manage to blow the dust off my table. Cubans in exile approached our shores to launch fireworks. The newspaper Granma assures me they are terrorists. I saw groups on the Malecon in the rain, brought there in a bus with government license plates, and they want to convince me that it is the people spontaneously gathering to confront the provocations of “the employees of the empire.”
I get calls from almost all the provinces in the country denouncing arbitrary arrests, beatings of opponents and other abuses. On Sunday the Ladies in White try to march down 5th Avenue and are forced into official vehicles and taken away. There are people on hunger strikes, others prepare and sign documents, the Twitterers tweet, the poets do their thing, the movie lovers gather in the screening rooms of the 33rd Cinema Festival.
Nightly TV programming includes a science fiction film where a young man leaves the plane of reality and enters a computer game. I didn’t have nightmares, but on waking up this Monday I surprise myself trying to find a comparison between the options offered by technology and those I just haven’t found in reality.
13 December 2011
