Opinion/Editorial
SCREAMING TO A STANDSTILL
Our weaponry is magnificent. The new artillery shells are rocket-propelled once they leave the metallic light barrels of specially fashioned art pieces that look like they should serve as foundations for sculpture or quite possibly be the sculpture itself. Drones get smaller and smaller with one designed to look and fly exactly like a hummingbird yet carry high-resolution cameras and tiny exploding rockets. These are just a few of the advances appearing as we make ourselves ever more capable of killing one another. Why bother to go into new drive-themselves tanks, exoskeletons allowing three-hundred-pound combat loads, or laser guns intended to cause permanent blindness, when we believe all those devices were invented to be used only against enemies of the United States?
These things, these toys of men, these instruments of deliberate destruction are required and necessary as are the ever more intrusive devices of empirical and information discovery and storage. Facial recognition from afar, GPS tracking in all devices, cars, and cards, and full disclosure of all written or spoken data available to any person even hinting that they might be with an authoritative agency have rushed into our lives over the past few years. They’ve rushed in with sales presentations put together to sell us on how these are things we simply must have if our bills are to be paid, toll booths avoided, and crime reduced to manageable levels. And our enemies held at bay or vanquished.
The marriage of weaponry and data acquisition is taking place right in front of our very eyes, although we don’t see it. Targeting is what the military and law enforcement call the data acquisition portion of the coming restrictive revolution of our time. Engagement is what they call launching some of our wonderful weaponry to interdict it. Interdiction is almost always synonymous with killing. Our police forces stock up on military items as they become ever more military. Armor, laser, electronic sound, gas, and automatic weapons pervade even the smallest of local departments. And drones are coming home from abroad, where they’ve been field tested for years, in ever-increasing numbers, to interdict supposed or suspected enemies of America. Satellites peer down on every community with an intensity and clarity no citizen of this country, outside of military and law enforcement, would believe. The number of these satellites peering down in America is four times larger than all the satellites looking down at the remaining 177 countries of the world put together.
The future result of this marriage of weaponry and data acquisition is to bring culture to a standstill. When no movement can be made—no experimentation attempted, or adventure engaged upon without overseeing judgment from sources known but unseen—then progress ceases. Creativity has turned from advancing civilization to surviving the crumbling of the social order. We are not experiencing the downfall of our great American culture. That event has not occurred yet and may never. What we are watching is the slowing of our social order. We are seeing open attacks on ideas and processes that can only lead to a standstill. Science cannot be attacked without science responding, by doing nothing. Literature cannot be minimized without literature hitting back by allowing the inexperienced to be denied knowledge of those who’ve come before. History cannot be ignored or changed without negative repetition seeping into the present and the future. We are slowing down as our fear builds. We are coming to view ourselves as peasants down in the fields, looking up at the walls of great stone chateaus. Atop the walls of those grand structure’s voices blare down at us about how we should work harder for less and be the better for it. How we should live without any guarantees of retirement or health benefits because that promotes a spirit of adventure and survival of the fittest. We will all be healthier for it. We, the peasants, talk among ourselves but do so in fear as occasional individuals are plucked from the fields or blown to smithereens by some remotely piloted drone.
We are in fear. We are not sure why. And all we can do is scream to a standstill…and wait for we know not what.
