What went Wrong?

1882:

I suppose it all started to go horribly wrong 70 years ago, when the Second World War was still raging and people’s attention was focused on survival and the fear of starvation. The profiteers were always there in the wings, planning how to increase their profits. But now it was a different sort of age, because all semblance of consideration for animals disappeared - they upped the ante, they took things to a new and demonic level. They exponentially increased the horrors, by way of pollution and violence, especially towards profitable animals and vulnerable humans (who let themselves be conditioned to spend their money on eating ever more of the animals. I’m talking about the 1950’s.

I was brought up after ‘the war’, but more particularly after The Bomb. A single hit of that thing and a million dreams go up in smoke. I think my generation of ‘baby boomers’ was the first to feel very afraid, for suddenly there was a chance of total planetary annihilation.

This marked a great ethical leap backwards. Not just with the coming of The Bomb but the simultaneous arrival of the first factory farms. With the bomb and the caging of animals we stepped over the ethical boundaries in order to find some sort of security. The Bomb brought safety from war, the factory farmed animal brought safety from hunger – this wasn’t a time for complaints. After the war there was food aplenty. And during the ‘cold war’ that followed, there were many tests to perfect the atom bomb. There was plenty of everything!

Now, seventy years later, if we have little hope for the future it may be because we’ve let science rage unchecked. We’ve applied what science has taught us to the point where we simply don’t have much optimism for the future. We now even ask the most defeatist question of all: “Do we really deserve a future?”

Here’s where we stray into the absurd, for it’s not actually about what we deserve. The absurdity here concerns other ‘bystanders’, other species, who do deserve a future, even if we don’t. And they would have a future if it weren’t for the fact that we humans have interfered with the balance of Nature. We’ve knocked down the forests, caged the animals and caused the climate to change. If we are intent on continuing being destructive, our life here is over and this place should be left empty of humans, for the pleasure and continuation of Earthly life for the innocent non-humans.