Programming Boards

My mind is strange. It think it's because I let it wonder free like a little kid in the woods. It follows its own unmarked paths to places most people never would have wandered.

So I was at my dad's work today programming display modules that will me used for medical devices that will display a touch screen relating to pulse rates and things like that. These display boards come to our company from another company that assembles them, and then we program them and test them. There were about 120 boards total to go through. I went through about 80 today -finishing what I had started last week.

As I was programming the boards -which just involves plugging them into the computer and pressing the "Program" button on the screen, I started thinking to myself.

These boards are like people. Sometimes the device you hook the boards up to has a cord unplugged, or like I experienced last week the machine that shows the current level had run low on batteries and wasn't giving a proper reading and I had to go back and retest boards. So sometimes the boards aren't the issue it's the system that programs them. Other times the boards have specific malfunctions that are internal and has nothing to do with the system their being programmed on.

Boards are like people. Society has its establishments, institutions, and cultural understandings that shape people. When the societal system is corrupt, people become corrupted. Just look at the Holocaust. The people weren't the problem, the system became a vampire that turned people into vampires. But the system was initiated with one man. A man who it is pretty clear was not functioning properly himself. A corrupt man made a corrupt system that corrupted people.

It seems that even in societies that aren't corrupted and adhere themselves to higher ideals, there are still random people who ruin their lives and the lives of those around them. Like the man in Norway who killed innocent people. It seems like a given. The more good people there are, the fewer destructive individuals there will be -though those few will do far more damage alone. The more corrupt a system is, the more destructive and despairing its people will be.

Our system in the U.S. today is pretty good if you look at it historically. In the 1800s 90% of the people were poor, uneducated, unhygienic, unhealthy, and living in run down places. Today, only about 10% of the population is probably struggling to get basic education up to high school level, they are living in apartments that have to maintain certain health codes, fewer people are living on the street, fewer people are unhealthy or unable to get some level of medical attention, and most people have the basic necessities to survive.

We are better today as a whole than we were 100 years ago. I would say even religiously. People choose to seek religion of their own free will now -not because they are pressured to pretend to by society. People ct more compassionately today as well. They use to have houses they would shove criminals, widows, orphans, and mentally insane people in to live together since society wanted nothing to do with them. Today we can see that as a cruel mistreatment of people.

And some would try to tell you that our society has led people to become more morally corrupted. I don't believe this is true. I think our society has just eased up on dictating the choices people are allowed to make. For instance, 100 years ago you weren't allowed to: drink alcohol if you were a lady, "sleep around" without societal ridicule, divorce, be homosexual in any sense of the word, listen to new forms of music deemed "inappropriate"... Society now has given us more options that before we weren't allowed to do because they were deemed forbidden with the consequence of being ostracized or arrested. Today people still gossip and talk bad about people who do wrong, but they also live and let live more than they used to. At least in America.

So you can say that because of this America has become more morally bankrupt, but I say they've just become free to make their own decisions, and tend to make bad ones for themselves. There's a difference between preventing someone from doing something and calling that someone "good" for not doing what you prevented them to do versus allowing someone to do something you tell them is wrong, and that person choosing not to do it of their own free will because they too genuinely believe it to be wrong, and are then deemed a "good" person.

If you force someone to donate to a charity, and then give them the choice to donate to a charity - is it better they donate by force, or genuinely decide on their own whether to do good or not? I think true human nature is revealed when people are given the opportunity to live their own lives. They struggle more with their wrong decisions, but they also learn more on their own because they are given the free will to gain the responsibility for being held accountable for those decisions.

So yah. Just some of my thoughts while programing boards at work today...