I don’t know why, but mush is what they say to sled dogs to get them to pull the sled across the snow. Mush is also a breakfast cereal that some starving kids would desperately want but most, don’t like much.
I remember Mom making mush for us one morning. I had been reading some history books about the creation of this country. One person in particular fired up my imagination: Patrick Henry. When I saw Mom cooking us up a pot of mush, I told her, “Give me pancakes or give me death.”
She simply turned her head toward me and said sternly, “You are going to eat what I fix and if you don’t get out of my kitchen, you’re going to wish you were dead.” Mom always got straight to the point.
Since those days when I had to eat what Mom made, mush has also been used negatively as a descriptor of the brain of someone whose grey matter is not firing on all cylinders. It’s this last meaning of the word I wish to focus on.
“Siri, play Rolling Stones, that song about not getting what you want.”
“Copilot, summarize this contract for me.”
“Google, how high would a stack of a billion-dollar bills be?”
“Cortina, write a note for me telling my ex-girlfriend where to go.”
“Google Assistant, what is 739 divided by 15?”
It goes on and on. We don’t need our brains anymore. We only need one of these computer assistants. Robots are coming soon so you can tell your computer assistant to make the robot do the dishes and mow the lawn afterwards. It’s the life of Riley our species has dreamed of.
Soon we’ll all be gathering rolls of fat while sitting in oversized lawn chairs around a swimming pool we don’t know how to swim in, sipping drinks with little umbrellas in them and eating all manner of snack foods made for us and served to us by robots. There will be a big screen with whatever entertainment we enjoy on it. We will barely be able to form the question: “Siri, what are the contents of this drink?” We definitely won’t be able to analyze the answer we get because our brains will be mush. Our bodies will be mush, too.
I know. I just described a scene from a movie called “Wall-E.” Lot of truth in that movie.
We need to face the facts. That scene with the grossly overweight humans indulging themselves while robots take care of everything is not too far off track. As it happens, our brains and our bodies work together. If one is not functioning properly, the other has some problems, too. I’m sure that’s why so many bad decisions have been made lately on both national and local scenes. It’s also why anyone under 25 can’t make change if you pay in cash. Calculators have become a menace turning our brains into mush.
The television was a start to this. From television, we got couch potatoes. We also scooped up a mind full of commercials with catchy little tunes that some of us remember even after decades of trying to banish these mind worms by consuming modern mind worms. This is why I wrote a satirical piece on TV back in the sixties. It was called “Terrible Vision and Health.” Look how far we have come. The scale for ridiculous has had to be enlarged to account for it all. “You deserve a break today.” Yes I do. And I’m going to have it with new intensified Tide.
“You can’t stop progress.” Don’t shoot that horse patooey at me. Progress isn’t progress if it’s going backwards. Don’t give me any more patooey about how we are going to be part machine or how the power will never go out because there will be so many backups. One thing for sure in the Universe I live in is that nothing lasts forever and you can always count on glitches. Who wants to be living in a machine body, anyway?
What about love? What about that special feeling you get when you touch another human being? What about nature and our relationship with it? How much nature will be left when we finish tearing up the earth for the materials we need to keep all this progress going? How much is the song of a bird or the chirp of a cricket worth? We have a lot of questions to answer, and time is getting short. AI will soon take over and we won’t be needed. I’m not saying that there’s no place for computers and AI and such. I’m just saying that we need to examine what it means to be human, how we are going to evolve in the future, and what place these conveniences are going to have in our lives. We can’t examine anything competently if we have mush for brains.