“But on a serious note, I wanted to say one more thing…I’m not poor.” said Benny, the first animal who could talk.
“You robbed me of my natural habitats.” he said.
At this the silence room grew louder. A few audience members crunched their nose.
“I don’t mean you specifically. I mean western humanity. You destroyed my natural habitats and terraformed it and then you prevented me from accessing it. You stole it from me. It’s not yours. You didn’t make the earth. Humans stole and sequestered what nature meant for everyone.”
A few audience members were getting agitated. One man said to his wife, “I hope there is a joke in this”
“And now instead of admitting you are a thief and returning it to me, you are demanding I be a slave. You’re demanding that I do someone else’s work (make someone else rich) in exchange for subsistence resources. You didn’t make the earth and blocking natures offspring from what they need to survive, what nature provided to them for millions of years is wrong. According to your definitions, it is slavery. It is enslavement of resources. And that makes you, the maintainers of that system, slavers, and starvers. and destroyers of homes. And massacrers of nature and plants and animals. Your existing way of life is a pillage and genocide and enslavement of nature and its children. Again, not you but much of humanity.”
“And you say there isn’t enough but you’re wrong. The earth and nature gives everyone a fair share of its resources. It’s not natural to follow ideas created by robber barons and slavers. Ideas that you still do today. No you don’t get more than anyone else. You get some but you don’t get to starve other people or enslave them or enslave nature. How would you like it if someone came in a bulldozed your home and then made you work for them?”
“I’ve talked to the redwoods. There has always been enough for all. Look at them. It was always abundant up until you became stupid and stopped listening to nature and started destroying your food source, and hunting it to extinction. Then you put too many animals in one place and you became reckless, negligent and irresponsible without any foresight, without any planning, without reproduction, without consideration for the costs your actions incur in the future. And you tie survival and success and upward mobility to how much money you have. Why? That causes you to overtake from nature. This is not natural. Paying and working for someone else is not natural.”
“And now I, the first animal who can speak, am being coerced to join you in your madness in order to survive? You say I’m free and not a slave and I don’t have to work but then you say if I don’t pick someone to take orders from I’ll starve? That sounds like slavery with a choice of masters. You say I can do certain tasks to survive. Freedom means I have a choice to say no and still live. If it’s work or die that’s slavery. I don’t choose that. How can you say I’m free if someone else chooses what I have to do to survive?”
“You are all great interesting creatures but my choice is to go back to my natural habitats that you stole from me and from everyone and everything else. As soon as you enslaved nature you created a slave society. Nature is not yours. You leave it alone. You get what every other animal has a right to. And if there was a legitimate reason to use more natural resources, you pay everyone for it at the price everyone agrees on…without destroying what makes it it and without using it up.”
“You restore abundance. You restore the commons. You preserve the nature preserves. You restore the habitats. You preserve and restore the old growth forests. you…” just the Benny stopped mid sentence. Coughing and gasping for air blood splattered across the podium. The attendant ran onto the stage.
Benny, the first speaking animal, looked down at the crowd. His vision blurry.
“Get him help” someone yelled.
“I know. It’s the radiation sickness.” Benny said to the first responder. Gently lifting him up they walked him to the ambulance.
Benny looked up as the statesmen ran up next to him. As he was put on a stretcher he said, “Do…. (gasp) do…what I told you.”
“We will. We will. All of us”
