Everyone's Gone to the Moon

Dear Kate,

Yesterday someone told me how robots are going to overtake humans and he's going to exploit it.

The man hardly has the wherewithal to join in the scavenging, not least for not having the one million dollar he claimed is all it takes to make three robot waiters and yield perpetual return to his prospective restaurateur, even less because he is at the age if not for the humans waiting on him around the clock he would have been exploited by the robotic workings of "progress" and declared obsolete a million times over.

God has been showering him with grace like the first spring rain and mercy shining through the playful droplets, but to him the business of Man is business as usual: looking after and looking out while mostly looking in, use or be used the only action and inaction to live for or die to, fear and greed stronger than hellfire to burn up the remains of his days.

Surely there are more urgent concerns than robots taking over the world, but to this man it's the most imminent and eminent, his fear of being exploited less than the dread of not landing on the right side of history, the left side of a cosmic balance sheet.  If he so needed to, he wouldn't hesitate to declare his many benefactors losers and cripples, for serving a man like him who strives lifelong to be neither (yet nevertheless).

It is easy to caricature a miserable man, as I did just now.  Though not easier than how we caricature ourselves and call it good business for any day.  Even a day that feels like spring.

We can vaccinate all we want but shall never build any immunity against the vicissitudes of life.  Adam and Eve would have every reason to be overtaken by their aging and dying, the process hitherto undocumented, every turn unexpected, but why does every pain and disappointment feel just as fresh and vast to us, the enlightened, scientific Man who has been told every possible and very probable ups and downs of life, in stories and books, news true or fake or whichever way we want it?

Surely our most adamantly denial of God is to live an uninteresting, hopeless life.  God gave us a Garden, but we would rather land on the moon.

Yours, Alex