Review of Equilibrium (2002) by Another V — 06 Jan 2017

Equilibrium is about a distopian society. Feeling is not allowed. To achieve that objective, everybody has to take a drug called Prozium. It's supposed to lead to a society of peace. Instead, it's a society of suppression and murder, where people are executed for the smallest things, such as possessing art, music, having emotion, refusing to take medication. Instead, the ideal is to be a loyal mindless killing machine, destroying those who are different, who feel.

John Preston, played by Christian Bale, believes in this system, is a high-ranking part of this system, hunts down those who are feeling and hiding their contraband art and music. He loses his work partner and his own wife to this system and finally has a day when he does not take his Prozium. John finally sees the light and feels normal human emotions.

Authoritarian systems can take many forms and use many methods: forced medication, execution of people for any infringement, hunting people down, control of every little aspect of people's lives, oversurveillance and loss of all privacy, overincarceration, government control of all freely flowing information to ensure it is the government approved version. Are such sacrifices worthwhile for the illusion of security, law, order, and justice which are not equitable, reasonable, or fair?

Times are changing. Ours may not look exactly like the world in Equilibrium, but we do and will continue to face many of the same challenges. "Big Brother" should be a tool for good, not a tool for evil. Lifestyle choice is relevant. Cultural choice is relevant. Humanitarian and humane penalties and rules are relevant. To give up all these relevant things that make life what it is.....Is that worth the illusion of security? To some, apparently it is. To me...not so sure about that.

Security is a balance of competent people, good technology, and reasonable rules with reasonable ways to encourage the following of those rules. Is what we have now good security? It appears to be a mishmash, to me. When security is used to enforce the will of the wealthiest over everyone else, or to deny reasonable accomodations for cultural and lifestyle choices, it is tyranny under the guise of security.

And what was the United States founded upon? What was so dire that colonists fought to overthrow their king for? Which famous American Patriot said, "Give me liberty, or give me death!"? The American Revolution happened and the War for Independence was primarily fought for mere taxes. TAXES. Taxes on tea. Not forced medication as depicted in Equilibrium. Not having art and music (culture) taken away.

Come to think of it, we have forced medication NOW. You must allow your child to be injected with substances that the person giving the injection cannot even list and describe or describe any contraindications for or any possible side effects for other than temporary pain at injection site and fever. And these injections are for the purpose of protecting against diseases which are not actually deadly, while the diseases they cause (autoimmune, SIDS, autism, retardation if your child has a mitochondrial malfunction, and ADHD) are comprehensively denied and covered up, blamed on something else, so that somebody doesn't have to pay for the damage. And liability has even been legally removed from the companies, so if damage is caused by their product they will not have to pay.

Medical personnel are being forced to choose between losing their jobs or accepting injections containing mercury, a known neurotoxin (which the so-ethical vaccine manufacturers used to put into children's vaccines too, knowing they were causing damage), and undergoing very minimal safety standards and testing (since they develop a new flu vaccine each year). Nurses are having to accept these injections in order to keep their jobs, when wearing masks and washing hands are safer and more effective methods of preventing flu spread in hospitals. Why? Because the biggest shareholders of the biggest vaccine making corporations make insane amounts of money off this system. But the government tells us they're safe? Yes, they do. Who paid for the campaigns of most of our elected officials? Including the ones who decide which people will decide what is "good" healthcare policy and what is "safe" to eat or inject into your body?

And now, you are doing a little "fact-checking" of your own, trying to find the study that proves any connection between vaccines and anything else and is mercury really a neurotoxin? You can find some things about mercury but when it comes to negative research on vaccines, the search engine gives you next to nothing. Huh, if it's not in the search engine, it doesn't exist, right? It's interesting, but it seems that those few studies that do not say exactly what official doctrine is about vaccines just disappear, whether depublished or just removed from searchability. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc are generally pretty compliant with government requests. A recent Canadian study linking vaccines to multiple conditions disappeared as fast as it appeared. One other bit of research I found several years ago that disappeared from search engine? Brain cancer study. I was so excited, when I found an obscure article online published in some medical journal primarily consumed by specialists. In a small study, a specific type of brain cancer went into drastic remission in most study participants, fully curing some and on the way to curing others. I went to find it again a month later, and all traces of it were gone from the search engine. It didn't exist. How sad!

People can feel safe knowing the government is keeping the peace in our land of the free. Big Brother knows best, even if Big Brother is owned and operated by all the biggest corporations, and the biggest shareholders of those corporations, in the US, through their long history of election campaign funding. Surely, they have all our best interests in mind.

I'm not saying that the US has reached the state of Equilibrium, or things in the movie Equilibrium. I'm not saying it's any one person or company or politician's fault. But there are things that need to be changed if we don't want our children and grandchildren to exist in an unreasonably authoritarian state under unreasonable rules and conditions. Some of it is here already, and some of it is right around the corner if we don't nip it now. And no, I don't believe in pure anarchy. That's another form of hell as well, as in The Purge. No thank you.