A Robot in a Man Suit

Robot Droppings (Click to see full size)

It is morning. I just saw a man pulling a green plastic cart collecting garbage at a rest area in Illinois. It is the back of the rest area where the trucks park, and there is a row of garbage cans encased in concrete decorated with beige pea size rocks. They are about one hundred feet apart. He checked the first can, but it was ok. So he moved onto the next one. It had enough garbage in it to warrant being emptied and the bag being replaced with a new one. He did so with well practiced movements, like a robot in a man suit.

I, the truck driver, watched him. We, he and I, are both tiny little cogs, easily replaced, in a giant multi-corporate global eating machine. The global eating machine is eating our planet and feeding it back to us, like chickens eating their own shit, because it is reconstituted into something that resembles food. It digs it up, taking the materials, converting those materials into devices. We consume devices, and convert them into garbage, making room for more devices in out lives. This is our life style. The materials are converted into chemical devices which are added to our food. We eat the chemical devices which are on and in our foood. Our brain slows down so that we cannot understand what we are doing, why we are doing it. "Because I have to." "We must eat." "I must have a car and a house." "Technology is the solution." "That's life." "That's how it is." We become better, thoughtless, robots. Another robot is a man suit, a big one, walks by with a broom and dustpan, stopping here and there to sweep up a cigarette butt or some piece of garbage left behind by the truck driver robots. They don't think, those truck drivers about how they toss their garbage on the pavement that covers the Earth. Must keep the place clean, so that other robots don't complain too much. They will complain. Life, the living, is that which is literally growing and creating more life. If we are to survive, if our species will survive, we must create and protect the natural living organisms all over our planet. Without them, we die, along with our planet. We must dismantle and outlaw autonomous corporate entities. Corporations must become functions, local only, with no more rights than a car, which is none. A corporate device runs a water utility, electrical, sewer or communications utilities. They are run by people and they make no profit, or even run at a loss. We are not robots. We are man. How can technology be the solution if the creation and use of it is the problem? -- Daemon Bernstein

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