ONCE UPON A TIME, right here and not far away at all, there was a little blue-green-brown world orbiting a common – but no less glorious for that – yellow star. Under the bright golden-white light of their star, even on cloudy days, many living things lived and died on this planet. The really dominant species was bacteria, and the second was insects, but the third, the self-congratulatory Homo-sapiens-sapiens, were total wisenheimers in the world-o-dominance and so called themselves the supremely most dominant dominaters of all what can be dominated. In other words: “W00t! wE pwn j00!!!1 1337!@”, they cried like frat boys.

Anyway, today is the day they called Earth Day, a day made in honor of themselves and their effort to make a good show of cleaning up after themselves even as large numbers of them still ran roughshod all over the face of the planet doing unspeakably vile things to it in the name of their god, “Free Market”. Now, some people really did do their darnedest and damnedest and whatsits to make the world a better place, and I’m not here to cast aspersions on them; the well-meaning are hard to find, and those who act on their well-meaningness are scarcer than hens’ teeth in the old chickens’ home (not that many chickens were ever allowed to grow old), so kudos to them (requiescant in pace and all that rot). But the truth is that in the end there were a lot of good intentions paving the road to that universal Lagos, and folks just didn’t get that there needed to be a massive revolution and not just a switch from regular bulbs to longer-lasting ones with mercury in them.

Because the revolution never came, and because they insisted still on driving massively wasteful vehicles on inefficient highways while gobbling up the planet’s resources as tens of millions of others starved or died from war or diseases, etc., and because they continued to allow an insane passivity to control them and their children, – well, things went from OK to not-so-great to should-we-worry? to what-shall-we-do-now? to oh-god-make-it-stop!!! to a death rattle. And then the bugs took over, although certain small mammals would disagree and nobody is quite sure if there are cetaceans left or what they’d say anyway. Probably just sing at you about fish.

Not to worry, though. It took quite a long while for humans to do themselves and scads more species in. Many of them lived and died thinking that – get this – the earth would be OK and nothing bad would happen. They thought they had insurance from the sky. You’ll just have to imagine me rolling my compound eyes. Even the kids of kids of kids of their kids managed to survive all right, I guess, all things considered. But once the religio-political infrastructures fell and the weather turned downright nasty on a regular basis and the waters rose and droughts came and viruses figured out new and unique ways of killing their hosts and famine swept the lands like clouds of locusts…. Well, it wasn’t pretty. It blows my wee little mind that humans ‘prophesied’ about it and then made it happen. They always were a species pro self-fulfillment.

And yeah, sure, all right, some humans survived. They don’t freaking look like much now, though. I’m sitting on the back of the neck of one right now. I’m not being swatted, so I imagine that this one’s not got much fight left, not much time to contemplate what happened. Then again, that doesn’t much matter to me, a gadfly on the neck of a dying human who probably doesn’t know death’s coming. Poor sod. Looks like it might have been pregnant, too… or, well, it probably just starved to death. They often look like that when they do.

Anyway, happy Earth Day! I’ll be seeing you.