The Cybernetic Lullaby, Part Ii
I read on my laptop today--
automation is making us dumber,
ineffective, maybe even impotent.
Perhaps it's a conspiracy by that secret
society, the computer brotherhood.
(Do you really believe your Apple is
innocent, and IBM is not plotting?)
Or maybe we should just blame
human sloth, that siren call of
sheer damn laziness which can
lure the best of us to a quiet doom.
A simple proof: hand a twenty to a clerk
and ask him to make change without
looking to the machine for succor.
That blank innocent look he gives you--
"Why me?" he seems to be saying,
and you can't help but pity him a bit.
He is, after all, a victim of mass education.
There are worse victims:
airliners wildly crashing,
doctors killing their patients,
nuclear power plants going
BOOM! and killing the land
for an eon or two, or three.
How like little children we were!
Thinking these machines would
be our slaves, sans the brutality.
But it is we who are chained by
the zeros and ones, we who are
thinking less, creating cheaper,
settling into a cybernetic fog.
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