#234 I am not Furby

The other day we were cleaning some of the darker recesses of our house and we found something interesting: a Furby. At one time, no young girl’s household was complete without one of these annoying little furballs spouting his electronic nonsense at the oddest times. Many an occasion I nearly soiled my bloomers while I was doing laundry and the furboid started screaming for attention. “Oooh, Kah scared,” he would say if you turned out the light. “Boring!” He would yell if he didn’t get any attention. It was like having another preschooler around the house. Except you couldn’t use him to do anything productive. Hey, mow the freaking lawn furmeister, or I’ll give you some attention you won’t forget. I got yer attention right here... You know, parenting stuff. How strange were the nineties. Programmed response interactive furballs. From chia pet to nano-pet. Whatever happened to Lincoln Logs? And then it occurred to me.
The biggest difference between a Furby and me is I have more methods of inputting stimuli and a slightly wider array of responses. And, I believe I am independent of my knee jerk responses. But preprogrammed responses are not that much different from habits. If I always check the lock when I leave the house isn’t that nothing more than a established response to certain stimuli? When my attention jerks when the phone rings isn’t that the equivalent of Furby saying “Kah not like” every time I hold him upside down? But don’t I have free will, and rights? Funny thing, I got a voters’ pamphlet a couple of elections ago. The Secretary of State, in his little introductory letter, talked about how I should participate in the election because it was a big deal to be—his words, “granted the right to vote.” Now maybe it is if I’m a Furby. But I happen to be the descendant of a group of people who weren’t granted the right to vote. They fought and died to establish the idea that it was their right to vote, period. And they didn’t have to be white or a landowner or a member of the Anglican church in order to do so. It was their natural inalienable right. Then the Sec talked about exercising the privilege to vote. We can exercise our right. But it is not a privilege, like it was given to us by a king, or in the sense that it can be revoked by, say, a teacher when he puts you in detention for disrupting his class with a joke and he revokes your privilege to go to the dance. It can be revoked by your peers only if you commit a major crime against your society. Some would disagree.
And some don’t even think about it. They just vote for one party or the other automatically. Or vote because a single issue triggers a habitual response. I know my Furby is on the fence on the issue. Ungrateful little robot. And I just granted him new batteries, too.
America, ya gotta love it.