POLITICS OR A PRIMEVAL SLUDGE?

This is an essay, really. Looking at some of the problems that are assaulting our hitherto delicious planet.

I should imagine there’s one thing we all notice as we pass through our lives and that is there is a tiny minority of our fellow beings who thinks they’re several steps above the rest of us when it comes to the evolutionary line without actually noticing that in reality they’re several steps behind.

Although I suppose it means what we mean by the evolutionary ladder. I have my own way of looking at it, a logical one which defines the evolutionary ladder as being a stepped incline starting way down low and ending up in some mysterious ethereal clouds which can’t exist but which are useful as a kind of analogy.

So where’s the bottom? In which primeval sludge does the ladder rest its feet? Well, that’s simple, isn’t it? I read somewhere, and I believe it because it was probably written by a scientist of huge renown, that life on Earth only had one mysterious start. And if you look at it logically that beginning wasn’t as complex as a mouse or a raccoon. Not even a fly or a wasp. That beginning was with a close relative of the amoeba, a single celled organism that could barely do more than exist. And that’s where my evolutionary ladder rests its feet.

At the other end, at the top, the ladder rests on a cloudy ridge of perfection and we might call it the end of time. Maybe it’s surrounded by a cloud of glittering something or other but more likely a nation or internation of superbly bright beings who don’t squabble or fight or have wars because such behaviour is beneath them. Instead, they exist on a high plane where thought and sex are important, and very little else is. And they’re surrounded by glittering stuff so they don’t even have to switch the light on..

Now, most of us are plodding up that ladder and, being sensible and wonderful people, we’re on our way from the bottom, which is already far behind us, towards the top, and on our way we’ve picked up a few invaluable hints. Like we don’t have the answer to everything. Like we’re one of a myriad of living beings (and cats, dogs, the aforementioned raccoons and amoeba) and all of us, even them, have a right to our place on the planet. We might not be equal in girth or even intellectual ability, but we are equal in existence, occupying a space in a particular time and dependent on the past whilst protecting the future.

Yes, protecting the future … but what from? Well, that one’s easy. If tomorrow is going to exist at all it’s going to have to be protected. There are quite a lot of bright young people about who can give you a few hints as to what from when it comes to the air we breathe and the land we walk on. We call it the environment, which is a very boring word when what we really mean is home. And it can easily be eroded by carelessness. By greed (did you know there are some greedy people around who would easily pile s**t into their home, and live in it, if the alternative is doing a bit of cleaning up?) and by wilful selfishness.

Those people are way down on my ladder. But there are others behind them and those are the one I started nattering about when I began this piece. I mentally class them as a group and call it a spectre of dictators. They are men (usually, though women are not exempt from belonging to this group) who believe their own opinions are so much more important than anyone else’s that they try to dominate those around them. Remember Hitler? Say no more. But this spectre of dictators, if they are stupid enough, manage to gather an increasing amount of isolation from the rest of humanity that they actually get to thinking that they’re above everyone else without actually noticing that their feet are slowly descending towards the primeval sludge and its nation of amoebas who really don’t want to know them.

We are all aware of some of them who, through great personal misfortune, don’t quite make it to power and influence, which is a good thing. But they’re around us, all right. Billy No-It-All, that sort, Annie I’m-Always-Right. Give them the isolation of the powerful and they’ll start a war.

Because wars are what they’re good at. Wars are where you brainwash others with your own ideas and mistaken ideals when they're too young to see how wrong you are and then submit them to a whole range of mutilations and death on the battle field while you hide somewhere nice and safe, probably with champagne and delicious Cornish pasties at your elbow, and certainly no chance of meeting a premature ending yourself. And then you can give medals and ribbons to the brave youngsters who have lost bits of themselves painfully, like legs and arms and maybe even testicles, as they fight a silly old war based on nothing but your ego and a few dreams of fame and fortune, which history teaches us you’ll never actually get. We never met Julius Caesar on the ides of March, did we? That was a day he didn’t want to see. Or Hitler in his bunker at the end? Or the confusing demise of Mussolini in Italy? Or any of the other slugs lower down on the evolutionary ladder than we are as they fall off.

The main problem with them, though, is the way they cause pain, misery and death to those of us who know a darned site better than them that we are closer to the shiny conclusion of evolution and the joys that a radiant future holds for our species when we reach it. I’d have them put down at birth, but if that were to happen I’d be just as bad as them. Instead, I’d invent a cunning plan that would painlessly and almost lovingly neutralise them so that they can’t do much harm to anyone. Maybe give them a dustpan and brush and tell them there’s a place in their heads that needs sorting out.

And by the way, and I hope this doesn’t upset him, but in my opinion our current prime minister is one of them. But he might need a whole bloody vacuum cleaner!

© Peter Rogerson. 19.03.22

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