Like a lemming, I'll soon join the throngs inching along movie theater lines, paying to glimpse a strange and unwelcome future.

The Matrix Reloaded doesn't paint a cheerful vision. It's filled with monstrous robotic machines that remind me of mechanized cockroaches and centipedes, which enslave humans and keep them in cyber-enhanced comas as they suck the life out of them.

In the Matrix, the men working for the machines are worse. They're deadly, numerous and they're much more efficient at killing than real G-men.

The Matrix's heroes are also easy to identify, though none wears a badge or white cowboy hat. The heroes are spoilers, interrupters of the dream, trying to get people to wake up and fight.

The good guys

That premise, I'm afraid, is based on some leaps of faith. First, that humans would want to awake from a safe, familiar dream. And second, that once awakened, they'd fight for humanity, even against overwhelming odds.

That may work in Hollywood, but we know that doesn't always happen in our unaltered reality. Here, life-draining machines aren't the problem; we are.

We don't want to wake up.

We Americans would much rather cling to simplistic images of our military success - the pulled-down statues of Saddam Hussein, our president landing in a jet on an aircraft carrier - than face the real complexities from our continued domination of Iraq.

This week, some of our officials authorized shooting looters. And hundreds of Iraqi families mourned long-lost dead, as mass graves were unearthed.

Yet we Americans continue to wonder why Iraqis aren't more grateful to us. Why do they want us out of their country?

We got rid of their murderous dictator. But they haven't forgotten our government used to support him. And now they suspect our intentions, given that American companies won the contracts to rebuild Iraq.

We should instead let the international community play a greater role in the rebuilding.

Waking realities

Here in the United States, we let lawmakers fixate on tax cuts, ostensibly to stimulate the economy, but which many experts predict will mostly help high-income taxpayers.

Meanwhile, low-income taxpayers get further squeezed as safety nets such as Medicaid, child-care funding for poor working parents, after-school care, and public school budgets take nasty cuts, with minimal public outcry.

Many of us don't even hear the hurts closer to home unless they're punctuated by gunshots. How many business leaders stirred by the recent fatal shooting on Fountain Square ever bothered about the "shots fired" regularly in other city neighborhoods?

All the while, domestic violence simmers on society's back burners, despite periodic eruptions like this week, when a Hamilton woman was stalked and killed - an ex-boyfriend has been charged - and a Lebanon woman shot and killed her ex-husband, whom she says abused her.

We know our laws and police don't adequately protect women and children in their own homes. Why aren't we pushing for more comprehensive protections and greater support for women's shelters? Why do we let so many abuse victims be jailed for striking back?

Most of the time, these issues don't even faze us because we get our news in easy-to-digest doses. We can expect even less in the future, if the Federal Communications Commission does what it is considering - letting media companies own near-monopolies in markets like Cincinnati's.

You won't see much news coverage about that, of course.

Our "reality" version of the Matrix remains intact.

E-mail damos@enquirer.com or phone 768-8395