The Love of the Crash-Test Dummies

They were born but to die. Created for the use of giant corporations, who would use them up, and cast the broken wreckage aside, scavenging only those pieces that they could use again in the next batch. From the point of view of their owners they were property, and they had a certain financial value, a certain utilitarian expediency, a certain limited functionality. But that was it. They would be strapped into position, accelerated to a certain speed, smashed, and analyzed. Their lives' purpose was only to add some confirmation to what we already knew or suspected, perhaps to add another significant digit to our degree of certainty.

Yet in the moment between creation and destruction, between the two adjacent steps in Shiva's ongoing dance, they found each other. They touched each other, finding a few moments of joy, of sharing of compassion for their limited lives and their foredoomed futures. They looked in each other’s eyes, knowing they existed, knowing the other existed, feeling more able to face their inevitable obliteration holding to that knowledge.

Was that a futile love? Gentle Reader, laugh not at the love of the crash-test dummies, lest the Powers that Be reveal to you the extent to which our own lives are the same, our own loves offering a similar support, our own corporations as rapacious and indifferent. We are, ultimately, all crash-test dummies, each and every one of us.