There are more people on Earth now than there have ever been. Humans are everywhere and are encroaching on everything. Much of our wildlife is driven to extinction or squeezed ever tighter into shrinking habitats. When you stop and think about it, humans are a bloody nuisance really and I’m not simply talking about that idiot who gets the strimmer out first thing on a Sunday morning.
So what can we do? Well, we can either stop or limit people breeding for a while perhaps. God knows, the world has enough SUVs and family orientated pubs in it already. I had an interesting exchange with a canvasser in the street some time ago on this subject.
I forget who she was representing at the time but it was some organisation looking for people to sign up to a ‘save the Earth, stop pollution’ ticket. I’m sure you’ve seen the type – early 30’s, long brightly patterned dress, lank dyed hair, sandals, a few facial piercings and a stranger to deodorant. She started off by asking me about my recycling and if I had a car. At some point, she had a gentle dig at me for not doing something she deemed compulsory and how my selfish behaviour would cause the end of humanity. I simply asked her if she had kids, which she did. I explained that I don’t and I have no urge to breed. I then pointed out that by comparison, my small failure to recycle lightbulbs or compost potato peelings or whatever she was moaning about, was nothing compared to the level of consumption and pollution that her kids would cause in the future. I asked her why she’d had kids and didn’t she think it was a selfish act in terms of saving the planet? She looked at me as if I’d just pissed on her nut roast and refused to discuss things with me any further. I persisted in my question but she wouldn’t answer and walked away to pester some other poor sod. Two lessons here
- Make sure your high horse isn’t lame before you climb aboard.
- Don’t approach me in the street – I bloody hate it!
Another possible option would be to colonise space. Hmm, several problems with this idea. To begin with, we don’t know of another habitable planet and even if we did, we don’t have the technology to reach it. If we did, it would either have to travel close to the speed of light to be of any use and/or allow for the human passengers to be put into some kind of cryogenic sleep. We’ve all seen the Sci-Fi films with space travellers awaking from cryo-pods umpteen years into the future and we kind of accept it as the way of things to come. However, we live in a world where it can sometimes take several frustrating hours getting two devices talking to each other when they are barely inches apart and we are often faced with crashing computers/software displaying nonsensical error messages. I can only speak for myself but I don’t like the idea of everyone being in cryo-sleep and after a few years, the display on my pod suddenly pops up the message “A system error has occurred – contact your Administrator.” For now, the colonisation of space isn’t an option – although there are lots of people I’d like to send there.
Which brings me to the idea of a cull – but where would one start? What criteria would be used to dispense with some people and not others? Age? Sex? IQ? Profession? Ever been a contestant on Love Island? Do they say Math or Maths? Also, who would set the criteria to be used? You couldn’t trust a political party to do it, could you!! No, I don’t think this is the way, as much as I’d sometimes like it to be – usually early on a Sunday morning when I hear a strimmer.
I would like to see our numbers thinned out naturally and I don’t mean by the restricted use of medicines or unplugging bits of equipment in hospital wards when nobody is looking. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry. I’m talking about good old fashioned natural selection, where nature decides who to get rid of. I recently read an article about plans to put lights on the pavements at road junctions so that people who were too busy looking at their phones wouldn’t walk out into traffic. Nope – let them do it I say. If they are that dumb and self-absorbed then the world doesn’t need them.
Manufacturers, the Health & Safety Executive, Governments and other bodies protect thick people far too much these days and they are interfering with nature. Certainly, there needs to be sensible and informative labelling where it’s due but if someone with a nut allergy picks up a bag of peanuts and then ignores a label which screams “Warning – this product contains nuts”, isn’t nature doing us a favour?
The same can be said for similar labels I’ve seen in real life or on the Internet. Superhero costumes for kids with labels stating ‘Does not enable actual flight’ and ‘Not bulletproof’, instructions for a mains-powered radio telling me ‘Do not attempt to use underwater’, some very useful help from the instructions inside a hair/beard clipping set I bought which told me that the nasal/ear hair trimmer was ‘not to be used in any other orifice’. All around us, there are labels and warnings designed to protect the thick people from natural selection and the Earth continues to bulge as a result.
Let nature have its way!!