We used to have legions. Now we have the military-industrial complex.
We don’t really see war anymore; not up close. It happens thousands of miles away, outsourced, managed. An all-volunteer army made up of farm kids, inner-city kids, a lot of Hispanics. Plenty of them did the math on tuition and decided this was the fastest way.
Disease doesn’t move through towns the way it used to, at least not here. My aunt goes home from the hospital always exhausted, talks about infections that don’t respond the way they’re supposed to.
Food is strange now. There’s always plenty of it, but the prices refuse to sit still. Eggs were five dollars, then eight, then down to three. Price swings for flour and many other food items have been similar. Somewhere between the farms and the shelves the math balloons. Warehouses full of grain, and one-fourth of American children cry themselves to sleep each night. It’s possible to hold both facts in your head but can you make them compute?
Many people sit at home and move things around on a screen and get paid for it. My grandfather used to talk about the factory where he worked most of his life. He missed it in a way I could never understand.
Everything runs on mysterious machines: grids, banks, hospital systems, traffic lights. When your cellphone dies, you panic. It’s your only connection to the world.
The system is too delicate. One outage; one little mistake in a place none of us could place on the map. We’ve built something enormous that depends on invisible parts doing their jobs seamlessly. It’s called the “fragility of complexity.”
So-called smart people are killing us.
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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.S. O’Keefe.