Kings to the slaughter (emperors not)
for Greta Thunberg
The people were living like kings. They had everything they needed and many things more they'd grown accustomed to, so it felt like they needed those particular things as well. Their wealth was the result of an economic paradigm which said that making money was always more important than any other consideration. These people were not all of humankind, not by far, as money is by its nature unevenly spread. Yet ever more people entered the realm of consumerism, a way of life which created enormous amounts of destruction and waste. To consume, you see, it was necessary for things to be replaced regularly. Without replacement consumption was not possible and neither, we were told, our jobs. So we hung in, as ordinary people had always done, and this time we were able to live in great wealth the majority in consumer societies. Some forty years ago it all started going downhill, slowly but steadily. It was all about the money now, there was no production any more, and very few people had almost all the dough. Meanwhile, for most people the environment wasn't so important. They wished it well but refused to adapt their behaviour. As if they could afford it economically. All those new town dwellers with their mortgage and their job in the city, they had no choice but to hurt their mother every day.
The great loser of this money madness was mother herself. She suffered to the brink of suffocation from so many plagues, poisoning, overuse, destruction and even atmospheric interfering, that it looked like people had caused her to develop cancer. Mother needed help and it wasn't clear to many what kind of help this should be. There were in fact two positions in the worldwide debate that the information channels allowed. Common people, who were only partly or not at all in on the greed rush, liked to believe we had best leave mother to herself and scale down seriously on harmful behaviour which we blamed the structure and its main beneficiaries for, large companies and government bodies and their hangers-on of all stripes. You could call it the holistic approach and the fact it needed an enemy which was much more powerful, tells you humans weren't going to win this battle.
The elites, the ones who knew how to personally profit from this dead end system, had a different plan. They understood Earth was dying but they weren't going to trade in their lush lifestyles. So they decided they had to get rid of the unconnected, the ones they liked calling useless eaters. There won't be too many of them, of course. A hundred million would do fine. Do you perhaps feel in? Then there's the four times number of servants and slaves, closer figures depending on how far they had come with the robot programme when the hour for measures struck. So what to do with the other seven billion? Culling seemed the logical answer. They had ample experience with genocide, though it usually happened regionally and was religiously inspired to make it all excusable. Yet it seemed this time some archaic belief was holding the elites back, as if they couldn't just kill us without facing netherworld consequences. They had to disappear us in a different way and preferably make us want it, or at least accept it, so after some previous fear campaigns on nuclear war and terrorism, they played their trump card, climate control.
The powers that be, as the elites are sometimes called, had long been messing with Earth's atmosphere. They had exploded hundreds of atomic bombs which severely damaged the protective ozone layer, they had developed means to change the weather at will and destroy foreign economies before they sent in their armies to loot the place. Recently, they have been covering the whole planet in nano particle charged cloud spraying to replace the dying ozone layer. Their planes fly overhead almost daily, leaving thick fat trails of dust. All this damage, then, had to be blamed on the masses. To enhance their message, whose precise wording was only to be decided upon in the last instance, the elites chose to launch a global suicide cult. It was not your ordinary let's all die and go to heaven cult, that was to come much later. For now they were all about guilt. They were going to make Earth's population feel guilty for being alive. Shame to be alive(2x), was their soundtrack. And the cog that made the machine work was the idea that breathing was the greatest sin. You see, when humans breathe they exhale CO2, like all mammals and birds do and some more types as well. Machines also breathe a lot of dioxide, much more than living beings in fact. It has now been established that this gas is highly sensitive to heat, so only a small quantity, some 500 parts per million, that's 0.005 percent of all the molecules in the air, is responsible for severe heating up of the atmosphere, with all kinds of expansive consequences. To prepare the population for further impoverishment it was not informed on how to survive the upcoming inconveniences, rather we were promised an electric wonderland. Everything was going to be electric, so living without carbon should be fun. They were still in on the easy ride, many people believed, there still was a future for them. That going all electrical is simply impossible for more than a hundred million people and that they weren't on the guest list, most of them still wouldn't fully realise.
To sell their not so pleasant message to the gullible masses, who were we to question the findings of serious scientists, the elites turned to a girl-child with an anger complex from Sweden, complete with ethnic hair, a cherry shaped nose and eyes like burning coal. They gave her airtime and scripts to read. Siding with her, at least in the public's eye, was a young US congress woman who was deemed influential enough to present the basic outline of the plan to take away people's right to live. Both women were quickly made extremely popular by the information industry. The older generations had shown their impotence regards the grave dangers facing us – the new climate was supposed to come with famines, droughts and floods and endless war, stuff we were already enduring – so it was left to the youth to save us all, well, first themselves of course. Anybody over forty hoping to hang on for a while longer had better get acquainted with some youths of the day. Other way, it wasn't going to be pretty but it was inevitable if we wanted to lower dioxide levels and anyway, we cheap losers deserved our fate. Now I don't know about the hippies, they've always been pretty full of themselves, but the next generation, my generation, could surely go a long way in this type of reasoning. The idea of opting out early had never seemed too outlandish to those cohorts approaching sixty. Was this going to be the heroic (if in the end useless) contribution of the no future generation?
It is a pity the elites only care about their own survival, hoarding ever more of that awful money. One gets the impression impoverishment won't be doing the trick for humankind and in fact it isn't, as only the final solution could reduce those holy levels. So that's what we're heading for, after all. Their god must have given them the green light. Get used to the idea. There won't be a pension for you because there won't be you. There won't be an electric car for you because there won't be you. There won't be another job for you because there won't be you. You had it good from day one and now the party has come to an end. Your party. I am the ocean, Titanic your ship, and I am the iceberg, the end of your trip. A friend of mine came up with these lines, back in the day when we already sniffed where things were heading.
So you see, Greta, we know what you're up to. Perhaps you don't know yourself yet, I hope you do, but we sure have got you figured out. You are going to lead the initial blame game, the lead-up to the desired disastrous results. Have you got a flat in Manhattan yet? That seems to be about the safest place on Earth at the moment. I wished, Greta, that you stopped with this nonsense. Murder is not the answer, which is not to say there needn't be some form of replacement. You are working for the ones who caused most of our troubles. They are using you and if you fail them they will cast you aside. They always do. Be warned, Greta.
With love, the subterranean traveller.
