Journal Entry: "Don't Be Too Proud..."

Something occurred to me today. In class we watched some gung-ho video showcasing all of the U.S. military’s hi-tech, expensive war-making equipment blowing shit up set to Slipknot or Corn or some anger band’s thrash metal. I watched the rest of the class getting pumped up and then as the instructor came to the front of the class afterward to praise the myth of victory through technological superiority. As a typical American pop-culture victim, I kept thinking of Darth Vader: “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed…” We have so much pride and place so much faith in our technology that it has inspired an overconfidence, a false righteousness that could prove to be our undoing. Our enemies inflicted tens-of-billions of dollars of damage, hundreds-of-billions if one considers the economic ripple-effect on consumer confidence, and murdered 3,000 people with box cutters. Throwing technology developed for traditional battle-front warfare at the problem, no matter how impressive the technology, will accomplish very little in solving the underlying causes of conflict. Its unsettling to see how much we still worship the high-tech, sexy, multi-billion-dollar weapon systems when its fairly obvious most of them have been sidelined in the fight we find ourselves in.