What if the Japanese bot sat down with the American bot and they both refused to fight?

We all know what will happen when the machines take over the world. We’ve seen it in movies, read it in books. Whether dubbed the War of the Machines or the First Machine War, it all comes out the same: judged by the number of human lives lost, the machines win every time.

photo courtesy of Terminator-Salvation

But what leads up to that non-mortal uprising? Do we goad them into it? Do we create them that way? Do they do it for our own good?

photo courtesy of The Matrix Revolutions 2

What makes the machines decide to obliterate us instead of calling us friend? Is it our own violence? Are we really a virus on our world? Is peace alien to our nature?

Maybe we better get our shit together and quit being so flagrantly stupid. Peace can be learned, the same way we learn not to touch an open flame: when consequences hurt, we avoid the cause – a billion deaths and the loss of our species should be pain enough to encourage us to play nice. We can also learn peace through empathy. If we can feel our enemy as we feel ourselves, we would be less willing to fight.

These are not new thoughts. Since we began to question our reality, our spirituality, many of us have pondered our relationship with peace. Peace seems to be the stranger in our midst, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Be brave. Be empathic. Be the peace.