General Reading.

   Please read the following text and do the comprehension exercises.  When you come across a word or phrase in blue, you may click it and watch a short video clip explaining a relevant cultural phenomenon. However, we suggest when you read the text for the first time, you should not watch any video to distract your attention.  After you finish the comprehension exercises, you may go back and click for further understanding of American and British culture.

                       THE LAND OF THE LOCK

                                                    Bob Greene

 

In the house where I grew up, it was our custom to leave the front door onthe latch at night.     I don’t know ifthat was a local term or if it is universal; “on the latch” meant the door wasclosed but not locked. None of us carried keys; the last one in for the eveningwould close up, and that was it.

Those days are over. In rural areas as wellas in cities, doors do not stay unlocked, even for part of an evening.

Suburbs and country areas are, in manyways, even more vulnerable than well-patroled urban streets. Statistics show the crime rate- rising more dramatically in those allegedly tranquil areas thanin cities. At any rate, the era of leaving the front door on the latch is over.

It has been replaced by dead-bolt locks, security chains, electronic alarmsystems and trip wires hooked up to a police station or private guard firm.Many suburban families have sliding glass doors on their patios, with steelbars elegantly built in so no one can pry the doors open.

It is not uncommon, in the most pleasant ofhomes, to see pasted on the windows small notices announcing that the premisesare under surveillance by this security force or that guard company.

The lock is the new symbol of America.Indeed, a recent public-service advertisement by a large insurance companyfeatured not charts showing how much at risk we are, but a picture of a child’sbicycle with the now-usual padlock attached to it.

The ad pointed out that, yes, it is theinsurance companies that pay for stolen goods, but who is going to pay for whatthe new atmosphere of distrust and fear is doing to our way of life? Who isgoing to make the psychic payment for the transformation of America from the Land of the Free to the land of the Lock?

For that is what has happened. We havebecome so used to defending ourselves against the new atmosphere of Americanlife, so used to putting up barriers, that we have not had time to think aboutwhat it may mean.

For some reason we are satisfied when wethink we are well-protected; it does not occur to us to ask ourselves: Why hasthis happened? Why are we having to barricade ourselves against our neighborsand fellow citizens, and when, exactly, did this start to take over our lives?

And it has taken over. If you work for amedium- to large-size company, chances are that you don’t just wander in andout of work. You probably carry some kind of access card, electronic orotherwise, that allows you in and out of your place of work. Maybe the securityguard at the front desk knows your face and will wave you in most days, but thefact remains that the business you work for feels threatened enough to keepoutsiders away via these “keys.”

It wasn’t always like this. Even a decadeago, most private businesses had a policy of free access.    It simply didn’t occur to managers that theproper thing to do was to distrust people.

Look at the airport. Parents used to takechildren out to departure gates to watch planes land and take off. That’s allgone. Airports are no longer a place of education and fun; they are the mostsophisticated of security sites.

With electronic X-ray equipment, we seemfinally to have figured out a way to hold the terrorists, real and imagined, atbay; it was such a relief to solve this problem that we did not think muchabout what such a state of affairs says about the quality of our lives. We nowpass through these electronic friskers without so much as a sideways glance;the machines, and what they stand for, have won.

Our neighborhoods are bathed inhigh-intensity light; we do not want to afford ourselves even so much a luxuryas a shadow.

Businessmen, in increasing numbers, arepurchasing new machines that hook up to the telephone and analyze a caller’svoice. The machines are supposed to tell the businessman, with a small marginof error, whether his friend or client is telling lies.

 

All this is being done in the name of “security”; this is what we tellourselves. We are fearful, and so we devise ways to lock the fear out, andthat, we decide, is what security means.

But no; with all this “security,” we are perhaps themost insecure nation in the history of civilized man. What better word todescribe the way in which we have been forced to live? What sadder reflectionon all that we have become in this new and puzzling time?

We trust no one. Suburban housewives wear rape whistles on their station wagon key chains. Wehave become so smart about self-protection that, in the end, we have alloutsmarted ourselves. We may have locked the evils out, but in so doing wehave locked ourselves in.

That may be the legacy we remember bestwhen we look back on this age: In dealing with the unseen horrors among us, webecame prisoners of ourselves. All of us prisoners, in this time of ourtroubles.