September 3, 2010

A Gross Depiction of (In)Significant Life Lost

Splat!

Don't worry, that was just the sound of the 277th insect slamming head first into your windshield as you pile down the TransCanada at a buck forty this fine Friday afternoon.

Could you imagine if that was the way you were to die? FACE FIRST into a sheet of glass that has something like 6 million times your bodily mass and travels 20 times as fast as you. (Sure, I suppose a person could compare it to jumping from a 20 storey building into a nice asphalt/concrete surface, but that's usually done at one's own will.)

Or else how about that wasps nest under your deck. Frick'n wasps. Better gas'm. No different than Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. "Let's get them foreign buggers before they get US!" I am certain that phrase had been used somewhere in the history of that "war". To have your lungs filled, your bodied poisoned so to become some sort of lesser being, by the hands of another manipulateur. Gotta suck. Mosquitoes get it twice as bad since when they aren't having poison washed over their eyeballs in the middle of flight then they are most certainly going to have their entire featherlite body pulverized into something lesser than dust as your gigantic palm smacks into the side of your arm, leg, cheek.

(Children?) set ants ablaze with gasoline and matches, or the various parts of its segmented body are stretched and severed just as Atilla the Hun liked to do to his captors in Night of the Museum. Earthworms are stretched in much the same way, or else are sliced into segments and forced to slide into some other trajectory, regardless of where this worm might have originally been heading prior to your "doctoring". We blast our garden hoses into corners of the fence rails where Charlotte spins her web. We do this til her lungs are filled with water and collapse completely. Cutting the lawn has never been so deadly since those moth wings came fluttering out of the side of the machine in a flurry of grey snow.

and it snowballs

as we pave

through paradise


Snap! Mouse trap. Pop! There goes the gopher's head as that thin sharp wire cuts through its neck. Let's go bigger.

Maybe you don't like some kinds of birds. Maybe you think "gross, a pigeon - they're so smelly and gross!" But I would rather think of it as pigeon nevertheless, rather than something that once was a pigeon, only now with maggots & worms crawling around through its bloody smashed-in skull in the middle of the Shopper's Drug Mart parking lot. Bigger again.


Farmers need land. And with ever-growing mega-corporate farming needing more and more land to feed this starving world, the need to rape and pillage the earth grows, too. "All in a responsible matter", mind you, but RAPE AND PILLAGE NONE THE LESS. So in the process - habitat destruction. Biodiversity loss. species extinction. Plants & animals alike, this life is being carded out.

We kill for progress. We need wider highways and more extraction of every kind for the best possible products and services that money can by. SO WHAT?!?! if proportionately more bears or deer or moose are being mowed down on our highways as we encroach further and further into their habitat (with the hopes of escaping the habitat that we've grown to hate so much). So we "progress" and "succeed". How can you tell? We get fat. How do we get fat? We eat The Meat. Hormone-injected cattle that had been crammed into corrals and lined up for slaughtering loin by loin for your dinnertime enjoyment.


should have listened to your parents
and doubled up on
all your peas and carrots



Let's' go bigger.

Tar sands.
300 dead ducks right? Nope, try 1600. At the hands of man. Or lack of hands, possibly. Windmills kill more? We're not talking about windmills. We are talking about dying. Dying stinking deaths. With 13 heavy metals and numerous hydrocarbons seeping into your bloodstream, disabling your ability to breathe as a soup of chemicals fills your mouth and nose. The tailings ponds associated with the tar sands are not just killing the animals that habituate in them. Dr. Habibi and Dr. Schindler and Dr. O'Connor aren't just called Dr.'s for nothing. Each can describe in more way than one as to how this region is causing estrogen levels in minnows to be significantly altered or how this region is causing some of the rarest and proportionately UNACCEPTABLE cancers are being diagnosed amongst human beings. People are Dying. So much for ants and spiders, hey?

Let's all just start treating each other and this world we live in a little bit better.

Ch. 64.