Before he retired, my Ex’s dad was huge in the defense industry and worried constantly that I would do something insane to make him lose his security clearance. (Did you know that the person who has the clearance is not usually the problem but rather a nut case who is close to him?) So my Ex’s dad told us that if we were going to harbor an illegal Palestinian we should stop using our phones.
We thought he was nuts. People are listening in on our phones? We would make jokes like we were talking to the government when we talked on our phones. But my father-in-law stopped talking to us while the Palestinian was at our house.
(Now I know why. Now I think about all the other things he told us. Like the safest place to sit on a plane is in the middle of the back. Not too close to the exit because the people there get sucked out. And also because the planes often break in half. The front is the least safe. Which makes sense -there’s no way airlines could charge extra money for the safest seats. He also told us that in a nuclear war, the mountains outside of Seattle are the safest, because of how winds on earth move. I should publish a book: Things My Ex Father-in-Law Told Me.)