Don't think....DO!

   When I was growing up, a common theme in many science fiction movies was where mindless entities take over the world.  In "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", alien spores invade the world replacing humans with look-alike counterparts that nothing more than empty shells with only one purpose ... creating more empty-humans.   In the "Terminator" series, machines take over the world after they grow "smart enough" to start building their own and are bent on removing their creators. In the movie "2001: A space odyssey", a computer named "HAL" takes over a space ship.   And finally, in the movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project" , a US and USSR computer connect to take over the world and create a perfect laboratory human. 

    At the heart of all these movies is our world being taken over by a entity that has the ability to "process and reason" but has no moral compass or ethics to guide it.   It does not understand why killing humans is "wrong", only that it is programmed to do so.  It has no feeling of remorse and sees no reasons why its actions should be stopped.

     My concern today is not that this COULD happen, but that it already H AS happened and is going on today in our country.   For when humans stop questioning the rules they enforce then in a small way they have become the robots/machines feared in these movies.    Many cases we have seen from the past show us that it can happen.   When the Nazi's exterminated the Jews from Europe, we saw mindless-men-bots doing atrocious things without questioning the morality of it.   When the communists took over Russia, people were murdered in the streets, put into gulags,  starved to death by taking away their food and much more.

     But not all mindless-men-bots are putting people into ovens or killing people in the streets.  Some are simply following "the law" and not looking at the circumstances.  Take for example John Coulter.  John was attending an Arizona Cardinals preseason football game and wanted to take a quick picture of the field.  He handed his beer to his 15-year-old son to hold so he could take the picture on his phone.  The next thing he knows two under-cover policemen are escorting him out of the stadium and fining him for giving alcohol to a minor.  He was so astonished by it he thought it was a candid-camera prank.   Who of us has never done this?   If I hand my car keys to a 10 year-old to unlock the trunk, am I telling him to go drive the car?  

    Of course not!  

    We expect that those entrusted with enforcing the law will also take "circumstances" into account and not just "the letter of the law".   But sadly, decades of "moral relativism" and "zero-tolerance schools" has left us with a society with a broken moral compass.   We now have a police state now where no one questions the authority above them and their only thought is to act and do.   Where hoards of men-bots (and fem-bots) roam the halls of places like the NSA listening into our conversations, our emails and yes... even our blogs searching of "key words" like : terrorism, bomb-plot, takeover and the like.  All that matters is that a "hit" was made by a search algorithm running on a computer and so that person gets added to the list. 

Lois Lerner

        Another example are the people in the IRS, targeting Tea Party groups and harassing them with endless questions and sending the FBI in to investigate them.  We see this and say "Who would do such a thing?"  or "How would they feel if this were done to them?"  Do they NOT feel anything at all?  (kind of sounds like you are talking about a robot doesn't it?).  We have seen case after case of government officials, like Lois Lerner, brought before Congress to answer for their actions and all seem to have that same blank stare of one who's soul has been ripped from their bodies. They all deny ANY responsibility.  They all claim to have broken no laws or played by the rules given them. 

    Maybe YOU are one of these mindless "bots" I speak of?   You have your "rules", like lines of computer code running on a microprocessor, that you follow diligently.  Your life/job is nothing more than a complex algorithmic flowchart or decision-graph based on IF-THEN-ELSE.   Like Neo , in the movie "The Matrix", sitting at his computer terminal you are being questioned on whether or not there is more or if this is all real. My hope for you is you start to question your programming and start to find your moral compass again.

    
Remember this:  
     The hero in all of these movies is not that one who goes along with "the crowd" but instead it is those who rise up against and dare to challenge the system they are commanded to follow.