When the student is ready the teacher will appear. Or so the Chinese saying goes. I feel the same way about books. There are books that I have come into casual contact with in stores, the library, in reviews and articles but yet never picked up to read. Yet one day I pick them up to find they have something vastly relevant to say about the way events are unfolding in my life. Michael Crichton’s Prey is such a book. Recently I’ve been thinking about technology and man and the sheer lunacy of progress. Should we assume that just because we’re in charge of technology now that it will always be so? Can we really assume that we are in charge of technology now? Who can still bake their own bread? Who can entertain themselves now without digital television or the false communities of online games and forums? We are as much slaves to our technologies as an elderly woman stranded by the side of the road when her car breaks down.

I’m not sure if there has ever been such a staggering combination of hubris and raw ignorance as man. We destroy the life-giving plants that provide the very air we breath in order to churn out junk. We taint with toxic chemicals the very waters from which we spring and that make up such a high percent of our bodies. We ingest deadly poisons that have been sprayed on vegetables and consume vast amounts of synthetic hormones, human and otherwise, in our meat and dairy. We are a phage on the face of the earth and we will consume until the cycle of self-destruction can no longer sustain itself and falls apart like a snake eating its own tail. A million years from now a new culture will rise which will be poor in material wealth but rich in art, music, and philosophy. And they shall not be human.