A daymare
I awoke this Boxing Day morning
to the news that a hundred thousand lives had been washed away by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean
and I was glad.
Glad that we could not blamed for this disaster.
We have turned in our pedal-cycles for 4-wheel drive gas guzzlers
and the climate is going crazy
and it is our fault.
Countries across the world are acquiring nuclear weapons
and it is only a matter of time before
some God-fixated fanatic takes out Washington or Moscow or Teheran or Havana or Pyogyang with a firestorm in a suitcase,
and it will be our fault
because since August 7, 1945
we have done nothing but march against the Bomb
instead of storming Parliament, Congress, the Duma or the Chamber of Deputies
demanding that they destroy all the bombs and guns and swords and uniforms right now,
not one day when some bureaucrats have ironed out every party of the first part,
and discovered that there ain't no sanity clause,
but now,
right now.
The polar ice caps are melting
and pretty soon we'll be swallow-diving off Big Ben or the Statue of Liberty
into the ever-rising waterworld,
and it will be our fault
because we refused to abandon the fossil fuels we'd built our so-called civilisation upon,
and we never tried to find out how to grow gills.
The desert being made to bloom like the rose
when the sabra cactus would have been a more appropriate metaphor
will cause water wars in the Middle East before long,
and it will have been our fault
because we allowed the water table of the Jordan to be drained,
and turned a blind ear to the hissing of the settler lawns.
Whole continents will waste away from man-made disease,
and it will be our fault because we allowed these weapons to be developed for the destruction of the human immune systems,
forgetting that gay men sometimes have female partners,
and still preaching that one-handed sex was a sin.
The inventory of our crimes
scrolls up before us like
the prologue to some cosmic space opera,
but we didn't mess with the tectonic plates to create this tsunami disaster,
did we?
Did we?
30/12/04 15:11
