Checkers - our prime South African retailer - is trialing a new "smart trolley" that does the check-out as you put stuff in it. This means that thousands of people will very likely lose their jobs as check-out clerks and baggers. As always, it is the corporate types wearing fancy suits who think poor folk would make it on their small salaries if they just spent less, who really seem to think this sort of batshit crazy scheme is a good thing.
Because of course they do.
That "Star Trek" future? It'll never happen. Humans don't have it in us.
Why do I say so?
Let me start at the beginning of the thought that led me down this path:
Humans want to believe they're ready to meet alien civilizations, and they can't even countenance each other, or domestic species that don't look like them... or have more then 4 appendages, or think they're better than.
Imagine the UFO door opens and a human sized spider emerges to greet the representatives of Earth... who run away screaming, shouting "kill it with fire!"
I think it's better that any alien nations watching our combative uncivilized species, keep on doing it from a safe distance.
In 50 more years, will those born after look back at where we are now, and think of the horrors we are witnessing today - war in Ukraine, fascism on the rise globally, the collapse of the USA and the slippage of its mask of pretend holiness - the raging, unchecked genocide in Gaza - like we look back now at the genocides committed by previous colonizing and cultures?
In South America? North America? Africa? Australia? New Zealand? Asia? In a hundred different lands, in a hundred different times, places and cultures - in a hundred different faces in black and white and grey staring back at me from pages and screens, from the other side of Time, in documentaries... their testimonies - evidence of lives that were shattered, minimized, dehumanized, ruined, forever changed and even extinguished in the hallowed names of God, Christianity and the almighty, pristine, blameless Western Civilization and its perverse denial of universal Humanity?
What will this moment in time look like from 50 more years hence? Will it be, on a day when I'm no longer here on this Earth, in Gaza then as it is in Auschwitz now? In Treblinka? In a hundred new blood-soaked ash-strewn fields of horror and tragedy yet to come? Will they be preserved as horrors and outrage against decency and what it means to be human - as indecent and imperfect beings? Or memorials of shocked humanity, as splinters, burning, lodged in ravaged Conscience? Salves and tokens to be observed, respected in ways never shown the victims? Or mocked and dismissed as "fake news" or "woke liberal fantasy" by "influencers", apologists and revisionists? Or will they be long paved over in streets of greed, hotels, pleasure palaces and gilded with obscenity and vile, vapid towers of "Progress" and amnesia, whereon nasty wealthy scabs and carbunkles frolic and play?
I look back over my years, my half century, and hold in one hand all I was taught - by teachers, histories, the general narrative, popular beliefs, and in the other - all that I have learned. The incongruities between them - the disparities - are immense and horrifying. The world I thought I lived in is revealed as a bold-faced lie, a pleasant fascade to cover up for the lies, deceit, brutality, conquest and greed that twisted the world into what it is... to protect and invent the reputations and positions of powerful white "Christian" men subject to insatiable greed - and always has been.
Beware the tools, my children, the tools of the System: "civilization", "morality", "law and order", "education", "freedom" - all these are illusions easily distorted and subverted to serve it, but most dangerously of all these, is "religion" - and those who hold the power to wield these.
Truth - in truth - is not subjective, nor objective. How we perceive it, or accept it - or not - is. But it remains true, regardless.
Diderot was right.
Tonight I sit in a restaurant eating a lovely meal, when a news feed on a big screen catches my eye.
1.8 million Palestinian hostages in Gaza are being starved to death by Israel. Skeletal figures appear on the screen, motionless, fading, the sparkle in eyes lined with suffering, gone. The food sours in my mouth.
