Is it ethical to vote?
Is it ethical to vote?
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Dear Ethan,
I’ve been a big fan of your column for months. But with all your profound advice on how we should live our lives, it occurs to me that you’ve never mentioned which political party you support. With the local elections in England this week, who do you think I should vote for?
Fran Chase
Manchester
Dear Fran,
To modify an old anarchist phrase, ‘It doesn’t matter who you vote for, humans always get in’. All this nonsense about ‘power to the people’ simply disenfranchises the animals, the birds, the sun and the wind. ‘Power to the planet’ should be our motto.
As I have tried to point out in these pages time and again, it is not for us, a tumorous carbuncle on the face of Mother Earth, to decide what the future should hold. In fact, the very notion of ‘the future’ is a poisonous one, implying that there should be a thing called ‘history’ and that it should be made by humans. For Nature, there is only the present – what more do we need? And if we allow humans to carry on determining what happens, the planet really won’t have a future.
My conviction on this point was only reinforced by my experience of standing for my local council some years ago. A small wooded area with some lying water had become an important site for the breeding of various creatures, including a colony of rats (an animal whose very life’s work is clearing up after humans). The council had decided, in their wisdom, to drain and clear the land so that an old people’s home could be built upon it!
Why on the face of Gaia would we want to destroy this beautiful place? Especially for a bunch of resource-grasping wrinklies whose only purpose would be to generate more carbon dioxide as their Woodbine-polluted lungs thinly snatched for another desperate breath!
I therefore stood as an independent candidate – a role I felt at the time to be a most noble one. As the sole candidate of the SOS Party (Save Our Swamp!), I tirelessly campaigned to protect the rats from the stupidity of the council and the greed of those pensioners. However, it must be said that my arguments fell on the deaf ears of an electorate as ignorant as the council they had chosen in the first place.
‘Why don’t you fuck off, Swampy?’ they would shout, quite foolishly confusing me with that legendary roads protester. When I spoke in the village square on why the development had to be stopped, I was roundly booed, and I even had a dead rat thrown at me. This lovely animal was snatched from its resting place to become a weapon in some mindless thug’s war on Nature. (And I was mildly concussed. It was quite a large rat.)
I realised that simply protecting that little swamp was not enough. What was needed was a grander vision. That’s why I launched my Manifesto Against Domination of Mother Earth and Nature (MADMEN):
1) The planet, not people, must come first. For example, if there is a choice between killing an innocent creature and allowing a human to die, the animal should live.
2) People must learn to conduct themselves within certain, planet-friendly limits and be harshly punished if they contravene these rules.
3) An end to all experimentation. Experiments are always conducted on Nature and result in learning things which perpetuate human domination. The teaching of science should be banned. The ‘Enlightenment’ was in fact the start of a Dark Age for Mother Earth.
4) A ban on the production of books. Book burning, while not a bad idea, is too polluting to be considered.
5) People are slime. We must be tough on slime, and tough on the causes of slime, until the population falls to an acceptable level.
This time, I stood for parliament in a General Election. This was a time for big issues and wide-ranging debate. Yet the only thing the other candidates were interested in was how they looked on television. They all refused to debate me. Sheba the Unbeliever was also highly critical of my refusal to produce any electoral literature on the grounds that it was a waste of resources. Was it really so wrong to expect people to convey my message using the oral tradition that sustained mankind before we became beholden to machines? I even produced a version of MADMEN that rhymed to make it easier for them:
The planet comes first, people are the worst
We really must live within our limits
We don’t need to test cos Nature knows best
You can take all human knowledge and bin it
People are slime, being human is a crime.
Five lines! Was it that difficult? Unsurprisingly, the electorate was unwilling to support MADMEN. They couldn’t even be bothered to learn it. From that moment I knew that elections were pointless. What is ‘democracy’ but the tyranny of the ignorant, obese, carbon-addicted eco-phobic consumers who, through the irresponsible baby-mongering of their parents, happen to make up the ‘majority’. What purpose can be served by putting the fate of the land into the hands of such cretins? As long as human beings must make decisions that affect the planet, power must be placed in the hands of those sensitive and educated enough to realise the terrible burden humanity places on Mother Earth.
I am waiting to take on this onerous task. I, Ethan Greenhart, will answer the call of nature!
Ethan Greenhart is here to answer all your questions about ethical living in the twenty-first century. Email him at {encode=”[email protected]” title=”[email protected]”}. Read his earlier columns here.
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