You Do Not Want To Read This Post

It was September 28, 1987:

18 ANOTHER ANGLE (OPTICAL)

The “Q” visitor moves a hand again to create THE SAME SOUNDS and the SAME BLINDING FLASH, producing the same human image but this time unshaven and with an UGLY AUTOMATION LOOK AND IN THE UNIFORM OF A MILITARY OFFICER FROM THE MID 21st CENTURY WARS. Q’s voice sounds a bit drugged now as he eyes his new costume.

“Q” (21ST CENTURY)
(interrupting)

Rapid progress to where humans learned to control their military with drugs.

— dialog from the two-hour premiere episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Encounter at Farpoint by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry.

I thought that was ludicrous, unbelievable.

Today is January 12, 2007:

Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War
The DoD is flirting with the idea of medicating soldiers to desensitize them to combat trauma — will an army of unfeeling monsters result?

I cannot imagine what aspects of selfhood will have to be excised or paralyzed so soldiers will no longer be troubled by what they, not to mention we, would otherwise consider morally repugnant. A soldier who has lost an arm can be welcomed home because he or she still shares fundamental societal values. But the soldier who sees her friend emulsified by a bomb, or who is ordered to run over children in the road rather than slow down the convoy, or who realizes too late that the woman was carrying a baby, not a bomb — if that soldier’s ability to feel terror and horror has been amputated, if he or she can no longer be appalled or haunted, something far more precious has been lost. I am afraid that the training or conditioning or drug that will be developed to protect soldiers from such injuries will leave an indifference to violence that will make them unrecognizable to themselves and to those who love them. They will be alienated and isolated, and finally unable to come home.

This is monstrous.

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