So I was in the supermarket the other day,
Picking up stock cubes for this vegetable curry I survived on for most of 2020
And I flipped them over
To looked at the ingredients on the back of the pack
I don't know why
I should know what's in them by now
And as soon as I did I remembered why I don't do that anymore
I felt my mood nosedive
And realised that I'd forgotten again
About palm oil
Which, and I don't intend to go on and on about it
But which is used in 50% of all packaged products on the market
And it's leading to mass deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia
Destroying the environments of endangered animals on a massive scale
Etc etc
You know the rest
We all do
I am
Tired of hearing about it to be honest

I realise at that moment
That I have been actively putting this shit out of my head
Whenever I can
Because to do otherwise is to wander from aisle to aisle in a hollow daze
remembering that
in the 90s
Coca Cola was hiring far-right paramilitary forces to assassinate trade union leaders in Columbia,
to keep their manufacturing costs as low as possible
Remembering that Nestle's CEO believes access to drinking water shouldn't be a human right
As they drain and bottle billions of gallons of the world's freely available water for resale
And it makes you tired
You know
It makes you wonder what's the point
And so fuck it
I pick up my coke
My oreos
My stock cubes
And put the truth away again for a while
Which, every time I do it
Feels a little more Like a tacit nod of approval

Here's a short horror story for you:

It is conceivable at least
That the distant stars that inspired Jules Verne and Gene Roddenberry
Are orbited by planets that are intellectually empty
No galaxy spanning civilisations or glittering cities or Dyson Spheres
No one blinking back at us through alien telescopes
Wondering if they're alone out here

Just us
Humanity
The smartest
Wisest
Kindest
Of all the creatures
In God's deep blue infinity

Personally
I am still trying to reconcile that possibility
With the aforementioned list of crimes we commit against ourselves
Our political systems that incentivise corruption
Health care systems that punish anyone guilty of being both sick and poor at once
And all of those things underpinned by a rusted, groaning economic system that can only function when lubricated with blood

If there really is no one out there
No one smarter, wiser, or kinder than us
If this
He says
Gesturing wildly at the entirety of existence
Really is as good as it gets
Maybe
This is an opportunity for us
The humane thing for once,
As a novelty
Do it quickly
Cleanly
And together
Our first and last act as a truly global society
To surge forward and embrace autoerotic euthanisia
Fill our coat pockets with gold bullion and walk hand in hand into the ocean singing kumbay fucking ya


I have been hearing more and more of this disingenuous eco-fascist bullshit over the last few years
And I understand it
I understand the despair when we mighty look upon our works
But I am sick to the clogged gills of accepting fault for it

Because the fact is
We do not all share responsibility for this
The vast majority of us are preoccupied with struggling to survive on a monthly if not weekly basis
On wages barely high enough to keep us alive
Sometimes not even that high
It is insulting to suggest that the average person has any influence whatsoever over the corpo-political incestual fuckfest
that determines how the people of this planet ultimately coexist
When the direction of society is influenced significantly less by who the majority elect to govern it
than it is by who can afford to underwrite the biggest brood of lobbyists
When the only crime the megarich consistently serve time for is fucking up the money
When 2020 saw the empires of billionaires expand like wildfires
while hundreds of thousands of workers lost their homes, livelihoods and sometimes even lives


And with this in mind
Here's an alternate short horror story for you:

The human race,
I think
Is fundamentally good at its root
At its core
A species gifted with, to varying degrees
A seemingly infinite imagination that has filled our libraries over the centuries with 30 million unique printed works of fiction
An unprecedented capacity for tool use that took us from inventing the aeroplane to punting a person into space in less time than it takes a human being to reach retirement age
We are the Mother of The Welfare State
And Penicillin
and Mid-90s era Green Day
This is us at our very, very best
But this machine we are wired into without our consent
Stretches us thin and wrings us dry
Anything good
Anything pure
Anything that cannot justify its existence by pointing to a rise in share price is deemed unfit to survive


Take the internet for example
In 1969
Data was sent from a terminal at UCLA to a terminal at Stanford, hundreds of miles away
And lo
Fifty years later, the internet has single-handedly changed the world more dramatically than perhaps any invention in human history
It should
By all rights
Have been the next great step on the path to a borderless society
A global neural network
Allowing us to share art and science and philosophy instantaneously

Allowing the ideas blooming in our collective consciousness to evolve at the speed of imagination
Rather than at the speed of the postal service
Instead
it became a means to forcefeed each of us our own personal advertising campaign
Targeted with the precision of a raytheon maverick


And if you think they've run out of ways to shotblast that wilderness with shit from corner to corner, then strap in
Because The Internet, as we have known it isn't even likely exist for much longer
The governments of the world have been twitching uncomfortably for years now
As they realise how hard it is to control a populace
who have real time access to
All of the information about everything ever
On a tiny computer that lives in their pocket

We built this brilliant, beautiful thing
Out of plastic and wire
And it was deliberately and maliciously lobotomised
By people who thought it gave the packmules too much freedom
Too much power
And this is just one example
In a list that seems to stretch on and on into forever like a Star Wars title crawl
With new crimes against humanity being added so fast that no one could ever hope to read it all


And I am done with sharing the blame for the state of this place
With the fucking dragons
Who have the resources to feed everyone
Clothe everyone
House and Educate And Heal everyone
And who choose not to time and time again
Who actively and often violently push back against attempts to beg for more pebbles from their mountain of wealth


Amazon workers frequently earn so little that they rely on government top-ups and overtime just to tread water above the poverty line
While the CEO Jeff Bezos has so much fucking money, that if you counted by one number every second of every day without sleep it would take you over thirty years just to count up to the amount of money he has
Oh wait, no
He actually has 185 times that amount
He has more money than the human mind is capable of imagining
More than anyone could ever spend in multiple lifetimes
And that's just money we know about
Because remember in 2015, it was headline news across the world
A global conspiracy by the financial elite
To hide TRILLIONS of dollars in unreachable, illegal bank accounts in panama
And what happened there?
Oh yeah
The journalist who broke the story was assassinated in broad daylight with a fucking carbomb
And the story disappeared

And I am standing here
In the supermarket
Weighing up whether I can forgive myself for buying a pack of stock cubes that has fucking palm oil in it
Fucking god damn it