David McElroy

If you send your children to private religious schools, you might be part of something that “encourages division,” according to Barack Obama.

Speaking to a couple thousand people in Northern Ireland earlier this week, Obama said that children going to schools in line with their parents’ faith — Catholic and Protestant, in this case — is a bad thing that “discourages cooperation.” Although the connections between certain things in his speech seem tortured and unclear to me, it sounds as though he’s comparing religious schools to segregation.

“Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity — symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others — these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it,” Obama said. “If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs — if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division.  It discourages cooperation.”

So according to Obama, letting people make the choice about how to educate their children is tantamount to “segregated schools and housing” and “lack of jobs and opportunity”? Really? In which alternate reality does he find this to be true? Freedom of association is a good thing — and people have the freedom to make choices that you don’t approve of.

To me, the attitude embodied in this speech betrays a couple of things.

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In 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” At the time, it was exciting and liberating for those of us who were paying attention. In retrospect, it was naive and premature.

Barlow has been an important figure in the development of the online world — both as a coder and as a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — but some people know him best as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. (You might also remember a story I wrote last year about his “love at first sight” relationship with a psychiatrist.)

Barlow’s declaration of independence for the online world is pretty libertarian in nature. (He’s frequently described as a “cyberlibertarian.”) It’s about the efforts of governments to control people and about how they’ve failed, so those in cyberspace were moving on to a world without elected governments. It’s about how those of us in the online world are building a new world beyond the control of governments.

The problem is that it’s turned out to be far easier for governments to control cyberspace than Barlow and Co. imagined 17 years ago. In fact, governments are encroaching more and more on what used to be a wide open frontier — and they’re imposing the rules and control of their world on cyberspace.

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For most of human history, the notion of job satisfaction would have seemed like a puzzling concept. Life was short and difficult. Just finding a way to survive and produce a family was a big deal. You grew your own food or hunted what you ate. The idea of a job — doing work for someone else in exchange for pay — would have seemed alien.

Today, though, survival is a given. Some of us might struggle financially — especially in an economic downturn such as this one — but we’re not worrying about starving to death. We have such a standard of living in this country that even someone who’s poor today would have been wealthy by historical standards. Our middle class families have things beyond comprehension to those in most of human history.

We’ve created a complicated economy that’s capable of delivering all this, and it’s a marvel. But there’s a dark side — and I’m wondering whether it has to be this way or if it’s an indication that most people are settling for being cogs in machines instead of making positive choices about what to do with their lives.

A new Gallup survey says that 70 percent of Americans are basically bored with or hate their jobs. The study says most people are “checked out” at their jobs or are “actively disengaged” from what they’re supposed to be doing. If this is true — and it fits my anecdotal observations — how did we manage to get here? And how can it change?

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