Machines

 

It's one thing to know in your head that there is an atrocity or an injustice or evil going on, but it's quite another to see it face-to-face and feel it in the pit of your stomach. Today, I watched the destruction of a mountainside and it affected me emotionally. I knew this was happening, but seeing it actually in process hurt.

I stood across the river and stared at a large swath of deforested hillside and at the heavy equipment and dump trucks continuing to hack away at the trees and soil. They are making a road to site of the new plant up the hill. All in the name of economic development. Here, right in front of me, were some of those jobs so coveted by the locals, tearing away at Mother Earth. I trembled in sadness and anger.

Do the movers and shakers who are so proud of bringing us such economic development actually come out to the scene of their crime to see what they have wrought? If so, are they at all conflicted with the decisions they have made? Do they think about what is lost as they pursue the great capitalist dream of growth and profits? Or have they altogether lost their feeling for the natural world, failing to see how they are a part of it and dependent upon it?

Watching the machines do their work, I contemplated the spiritual illness of this scene. I was looking at machines destroying life. And I thought - there is something machine-like in the people driving those machines too. A lack of greater perspective about what they are doing. Somehow, their actions are without moral import, it's just a job, it's making a living, doing what you gotta do. Following orders. Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. 

The system that put these machines into motion is the same system that is creating the plant up the hill that will manufacture components for jet engines, some of which will be used in fighter jets. Machines are preparing the ground for a place where more machines will be creating machines for a war machine. And the people who run all these machines themselves operating like machines.

It's all so inhuman. So unnatural. So lifeless.