Sometimes, there are just things that you’ve lived with for so long you stop noticing them, and something random comes up and shocks you.
Today I was at Safeway and the lady asked if we had a Safeway card (there were three of us) and I said that my parents might and she offered to use it on all three separate orders. I volunteered my old home phone number, pulling numbers from the back of my mind, reeling off numbers I hadn’t given to anyone in months.
Because as much as I hate it, our whole lives are defined by numbers. Social security. University ID. Telephone. Cell phone.
Our lives should be defined by words, by deeds and actions and descriptions and names and just something a little more personal than a string of numbers. Numbers that can be rearranged again and again and yet still never hold any significance, any hint of personality or separateness. Numbers that blend in, that forge us into one herd, one mass of humanity rather than individuals.
The Nazis tattooed numbers on the Jews during the Holocaust. Nobody seems to question that this was a terrible thing to do, to mark them like that so they could never escape the memory of the horror, never get away. To mark them so that others would always know what had happened to them. A mark of pity, maybe, an inhuman mark; a forced mark, that its victims had no choice in.
Maybe our own numbers aren’t so horrible. They aren’t a visible mark, they don’t remind anyone of a massive genocide. But. The implications are there: we get no say in the fact that we are controlled by numbers; we can never get away.
Numbers have no feeling, no humanity, nothing that can be shaped and molded to mean something special, the way a name can.
I leave you with this quote:
“Oh you’ve given me a number and you’ve taken off my name;
To get around this campus, why, you almost need a plane.
I wish that you’d make up your mind; I wish that you’d decide
That I should live as freely as those who live outside
Cause we also are entitled to the rights to be endowed
So when I’ve got somethin’ to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now.”
