Boeing has developed a new highflying drone called the Phantom Ray capable of carrying a 4,500-pound payload, which can be dropped on unsuspecting “enemies” from 40,000 feet in the air. Not only does the pilot get to stay safe at home, he doesn’t even have to guide the Phantom Ray with a joy stick as with the now old fashioned drones. He simply enters the target coordinates into a U.S. Air Force computer and its nifty programs take care of the rest.
Is there no end to the marvels of modern technology? Probably not, but there may be an end to civilization as we know and enjoy it; and it’s getting here a lot faster than climate change. We may blow ourselves up before the rising oceans cover our coasts while the inland dries up, bugs destroy our forests and crops and cancer fries our skin.
There is something satisfying about that. You know, to be destroyed by our rational brainpower instead of our irrational stupidity. But is there a difference? We are just as dead either way.
Fundamentalists on the religious end of the spectrum would say we are doing God’s will and the devil made us bomb him and kill ourselves in the process; but that’s okay because everyone who counts is raptured up to heaven where Jesus and 72 virgins await. Those at the other end would say man is still the measure and rational logic survives even if we do not.
Why is it worse to be destroyed by a pilotless drone than a bomb dropped from a B-52? For the same reason that Hitler’s holocaust was worse than the pogroms preceding it, the Armenian genocide in Turkey just 20 years earlier and the Rwandan genocide, is still going on 15 years later.
I think it is because human passion was dispensed with by the Nazis who set up a killing machine to eliminate Jews and other unwanted minorities rationally and efficiently. Like spraying mosquitoes.
Jews responded to this ultimate horror by establishing the state of Israel in the land of Palestine, which had been ruled by the Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, various Crusaders, Turks and Great Britain since the original state was destroyed in 70 C.E. In perhaps the ultimate irony, the new Israel would be for Jews only. Arab Muslims and Christians were pushed into ghettos on the West Bank and Gaza where they dream of returning home and take pot shots at the Israelis who answer with bombs.
Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows. Well, not nobody exactly; just nobody anyone pays much attention to. People like Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun (Hebrew for repair the world) magazine and a tiny movement to apply liberal spiritual values in American politics, the Deli Lama, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Jesus Christ, perhaps the most ignored, misunderstood and misrepresented of the lot.
What is the answer? – love. Not love that demands love in return as a reward; not Christian or any other religious love; not patriotic love of home and country; not tough love and those other radio psychologist cliché loves. Unconditional love, unmindful of material stuff, self-aggrandizement or self-preservation.
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