I Can Wait

                  It was a warm June evening.  Bobby and Sally were at the lake with their parents, enjoying some ice cream after dinner.  The sun was setting, and there was a cool breeze in the air. “I’m cold!” Bobby exclaimed.

                “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have eaten your ice cream so fast,” said his father.

                “Here, you can have the blanket,” said his mother.  She unwrapped the wool blanket from around herself and gave it to her son.  “There we go, that’s better.”

                “Hey, I’m cold too!” screamed Sally.  She couldn’t stand when her parents gave Bobby special treatment.  “It’s not fair, you guys only care about Bobby. You gave him a cell phone and I still don’t have one yet, and he’s YOUNGER than me!”

                “Sally, we’ve talked about this,” her father started.  “Bobby plays baseball every day after school.  He needs a phone so he can call us when he’s done for a ride home.”

                “But I’m FOURTEEN years old!  All of my friends have a cell phone, it’s not fair.  I want to Snapchat with them!”

                “Having a phone is a big responsibility, Sally,” her mother said.  “They’re meant for adults, and other kids can abuse them.  Not to mention the NSA will start tracking your every move, and recording all your conversations.  Are you sure you’re ready for that?”

                “What do you mean?” asked Sally, innocently.  “What’s the NSA?”

                “The National Security Agency,” her father answered.  “It’s a division of the US government that’s supposed to protect us.  They do it by monitoring all our activity; our phone calls, our text messages, even our physical location.”

                “How does that protect us?” asked Bobby, confused.  “What does the NSA do with all of that information?”

                The children sat and listened to their parents, questioning their privacy for the first time.  They were told how the NSA stores all of their activity in databases, able to be accessed at any time.  How nothing they shared over the internet was safe from the NSA’s prying eyes.  And most importantly, they were told how there was nothing they could do to stop it.

                “But that doesn’t seem right,” said Sally.  “I thought that we had basic rights?  I learned about it during social studies, it’s in the Constitution!”

                “That’s true, Sally,” her mother replied.  “But those laws were established a long time ago.  Before things like the internet and telephones were even thought of.  Nobody thought about privacy or how technology would affect it back then.”

                “The government is very powerful,” continued her father.  “And they require us to put a lot of trust in them.  The best thing we can do is be informed about what’s going on, and elect officials that we think we can depend on.  We don’t have any other choice.”

                “But what if there are things I don’t want the government to know?” asked Bobby.  “I’ve said bad things about my teachers on the phone!”

                “Which ones?” laughed his mother.  “They aren’t interested in that, Bobby.  Yes, they may be recording your conversations and copies of your messages.  But they aren’t going to read them unless they think you are a threat to national security.  They don’t care about your teenage crushes or what you think of Mrs. Blankenship.”

                “There are things about my past that I’d rather the government didn’t know,” said his father.  “But what am I going to do?  Cut off all communication?  That would be silly.”

                “So we just have to accept the NSA, because we can’t do anything about it?” asked Sally.

                “Pretty much,” both parents responded at once.

                “Maybe you’re right,” Sally said.  “I don’t really need a cell phone.  I can wait.”  The family watched as the last beams of light descended over the lake in silence.