Today, November 20th, 2006, I lost a good friend and a true inspiration. I am better for knowing him. These words are his.

- Carl Hose

Sometimes I find myself wanting to say the bad G-word. Say it with a certain disdain and vehemence. And the good G-word sure ain't government.

But what I really want to talk about, for the moment, is a friend of mine. He's a good guy. He has uncommon integrity. He's also very creative. And he likes to share with other people. That being the case, he started writing around age 15. He was first published at age sixteen. Over the years, he has written and published many pieces, ranging from adult fiction to stories about ghosts and lighthouses, to the wonders of Tabasco sauce. He never got into drugs and he wasn't selfish or callous in his relations with the opposite sex. He wasn't big into porn, advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government, anarchy, or any other antisocial or deviant behavior. He's just a good, decent, American kind of guy.

Anyway, as you might suspect, he spends a lot of time writing and working on the Internet. He even has a web-page, www. something or the other. So he's all excited about this web page, and he calls the other day with an interesting tidbit. He says, "Willie, man, I'm getting a lot of activity on my page." He goes on to tell me that people are linking on his page from Spain, Portugal, and other countries, as well as in the United States. So I ask him, how do you know? He tells me that he found a service on the Internet called Extreme Tracking that provides a listing of everyone who has visited his site. That's when he drops the other shoe. He says, "I'm reading through the list of the people who have visited, and there at the bottom, guess what?"

" What?" I ask.

" U. S. Government."

Those three words. They lay a cold finger on my spine and a hot flash across my forehead. I couldn't believe it. The U.S. Government monitoring his actions on the Internet. He hasn't been labeled as subversive, dangerous, or in any way criminal. Just your regular John Q. Citizen, in the privacy of his own home.

I fell into a fugue, and a kaleidoscope of images tumbled through my mind. And on their heels, concrete thoughts of the myriad ways the government monitors, controls, and attempts to own, not only the lion's share of our paychecks, but our thoughts, our privacy, our freedom, and if they could, our very souls. How many people do they have in anonymous suits, in gray cubicles, in high-rise and underground installations, garnering, collating, tabulating, projecting, and running surveillance on the American people?