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We need to BAN Christmas, urgently
4 years agoMerry Christmas, everyone.
This is about as good a moment as any (and a better one than most) to remind ourselves that Christmas needs, urgently, to be outlawed. There y'all are right now, surrounded by layer after unjustifiably, superfluous layer of plastic packaging and plastic wrappings and shiny, spangly, plastic-coated dead-tree wrapping paper which was used for keeping safe the useless plastic tat which you gifted to "the kids" (and plenty of adults besides), almost all of which will never be played with or used nor even be remembered to exist beyond yesterday morning, 20 seconds after it was uncovered, and much of which was utterly disregarded a good deal sooner than 20 seconds after it was uncovered. And all of it had been bubble-wrapped and shrink-wrapped onto plastic or wooden pallets, and shunted (by FLTs powered by electricity generated from carbon-emitting power stations) onto huge trucks and enormous ships and massive cargo planes, all of which pump exaggeratedly gargantuan quantities of carbon out into our air.
...And all for what? So that yous can use your plastic credit cards to waste money you haven't got, voraciously accumulating useless, tacky tat that nobody wants and nobody will ever need? Why do you even think that "the kids" (and plenty of adults besides) are going to forgive you for paying close-to-zero (or, in some cases, actually zero) attention to them all year, not showing much of a care as to whether they lived or died just because you hand them a toy they'll never get around to playing with or a book they're never going to bother to read or some aftershave that will go directly to landfill/oceanfill without ever having been opened?
Just stop it, folks. Ban Christmas, ban Valentine's Day, ban Mother's Day, ban Earth Day, ban Halloween, ban Easter, ban birthdays, ban ALL of these dumb, self-destructive consumerism-fests. ...Or don't. And in that latter case, don't dare ever whine that you're "concerned" about dolphins and turtles choking on bottles and straws and mutipack can-rings and bubble-wrap and what have you.
There's not much common ground that I share with the cute little Extinction Rebellion campaigners, but they and I do agree on this: we either STOP ritualistically, in worship of consumerism, killing ourselves and our non-human fellow inhabitants of planet Earth, immediately, or we accept that it's already all over, and we're just killing time while we wait for the various crises to join hands, reach critical mass and wipe us all totally out.
This has all been clear to me for a couple of decades now. This year, the total number of Christmas presents (and birthday, etc presents) that I've bought is exactly zero; that figure hasn't shifted upward so far in all of this century to date. I recommend yous all consider doing likewise: nobody (whose love is worth cherishing) will love you any less.
And, sure: you can bleat that there are many more trees in the northern hemisphere right now than there were a hundred years ago, thanks to coal becoming the fuel of choice for heating homes and generating electricity. Fine, take comfort in that if you're too cowardly to bite the bullet and actually do the right thing, the self-interested thing. And while you're taking comfort in that true-but-woefully-far-from-good-enough statistic, don't dare count how many trees are being ripped out, slashed and burned daily in Brazil, Africa or Indonesia.
And you might say "Well, okay, David, but what about jobs and the economy and what not, eh? Eh? Eh?" ...Yeah: good luck finding a job or an economy of any kind once our life-supporting habitats are all utterly wrecked by the products of our own stupid ingenuity.
Anyhow, anyhow. Anyhow: just THINK about what you're doing. There's nothing wrong with hating all life and hating all humans and hating all dolphins and hating all else, and gleefully, gaily getting out and grabbing all the plastic-wrapped plastic immaterial surrealia you can, just as long as you're honest about that fact. Knock yourself out, as it were.
Merry Christmas, folks! And a phenomenally prosperous 2020 to you all!
