Who Cares? Not Me!

Do you ever wonder how much longer we’re gong to be able to pretend there’s nothing wrong with the world? I’m not just pointing my finger at the West or America here, I’m talking all of us: from the politburo in China and Whitehall in England, from The Hague to the Black Sea, from The Amazon Basin to The Outback, and everywhere in between and all around.

We’ve got business interests making as much money as they possibly can this very minute everywhere and anywhere. They don’t care if they use ten-your-old girls in their factories or if they’re selling those same girls as whores to wealthy clients – it’s all money. People like stone washed jeans so we will strip mine pumice from mountains, use sulphuric acid to separate out the impurities, and make lots of money from the jeans for the year they are fashionable.

The factory fishing boats pulled up to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and filled up their holds with fish, canned them, and started all over again. Who needs a catch limit? The fish won’t run out. In Japan and Northern Ontario, paper companies used the nice clean water of the rivers rushing by their factories to help clean out the giant presses. They did a great job of washing the mercury out of the equipment and into the water system. It’s okay though because the water is moving, so it will clean itself.

The International Monetary Fund decides to give one of the deserving countries in Africa a helping hand instead of a handout. All they have to do is be a little financially responsible and they will get their loan. Cutting all social spending is a good start – people who never had education or health care aren’t going to miss it anyway, are they? You can’t block foreign companies from owning your national resources either. It’s a global economy, now don’t you know?

Not to worry if you think you’re going to having problems making your interest payments on time; you’d be surprised how few things really are essential services. Who needs roads to all these isolated areas? Nobody goes there, do they? With so few people having indoor washroom facilities, why do you need to build sewers anyway? It’s just wasting the money you could be using to pay the interest on the loan. See, it’s easy if you just use common sense.

There’re people dying by the thousands, if not millions, in Africa from the spread of HIV/AIDS, but we can’t corrupt their morals by offering them condoms to help stop the spread of disease. Giving prostitutes condoms to hand out to their clients for protection will encourage them to have sex out of wedlock instead of waiting for Mr. Right to come along like they should.

Anyway it’s Africa, and people are always dying of something there – this country has a civil war, that country has a famine, and despots rule the rest. It’s not as if they have contributed anything to the world except refugees and starving mouths to feed, so it’s no big loss. Between Europe and North America, most of the oil, gold, and other valuable natural resources have been locked up for the next few decades already. Without the slave trade, there’s not much else of value left.

The increase in severe weather systems doesn’t need to be a cause for alarm. Instead they should be thought of as opportunities for change. Look what happened after the tsunami in South East Asia – all those messy fishing shacks and villages were washed away and new fancy hotel and condominium complexes have come up in their place.

Instead of having to perform the back breaking labour of fishing and living without electricity and running water, the former fishermen and their families now have nice clean service industry jobs and live in apartment blocks with all the amenities in one room. Some of them had never even seen a television or lived above ground level before if you can believe that.

There’s only so long I can even write like that without feeling sick to my stomach. I hope to God there aren’t people out there who still think like this. I have a sick feeling there are more of them, then, I want to know about, and far too many have positions of power.

There aren’t many days when something doesn’t strike me about our outrageous hubris in thinking, that just because we as humans do something it’s the right thing to do. There’re the idiots who call themselves environmentalists because they move into a desert environment and proceed to plant trees. That they are messing with one of the most delicate ecosystems in the world by introducing something with the deep, thirsty root system of a maple or other deciduous tree that disrupts the water table escapes them completely.

That sort of behaviour may not appear like much to some of you, but it’s an indication of just how thoughtless we’ve become. If we care that little about where we live, how are we going to be able to care about someone else’s life and where they live? If we can’t get it together soon and stop pretending everything’s okay, everything could start falling apart at the seams. With a few more Katrinas or another tsunami or two, the cracks will start showing and the walls will start coming down.

Then we’re all going to have to get used to living without electricity or running water.