Accusing others of inconsistency had become a weapon. Those who promoted environmentalism through the press were reminded where paper came from, those who shared news on the subject online were answered mentioning digital pollution and the origin of coltan. In that world, anyone who showed society its stains was accused of inconsistency and silenced; after all, given how that world was structured, it was virtually impossible to be consistent. Any means used to raise people’s awareness of environmental issues clashed with the message they aimed to convey: from magazines to spray cans, from billboards to blogs. Those who proved to have a conscience were accused of biting the hand that fed them.
Then, the most radical and idealist groups found a drastic solution to draw attention to their cause: they hanged themselves naked from the gates of multinational companies, threw themselves from buildings into the traffic, wrote on the city walls with their own blood. Committing suicide had become the only way to stop contributing to the destruction of the planet.
One day, the scornful and powerful enemy of those environmentalists, the symbol of everything they were fighting against, tweeted: “Let’s help them kill themselves”.
He couldn’t imagine that tweet would become the new motto of those who had nothing more to lose.
With the perseverance and zeal of young idealists, the environmentalists poured petrol into rivers and set fire to forests, they burnt down everything, spilled any kind of waste into the sea. Thousands of young people, all over the world. Always to the cry of “Let’s help them kill themselves”.
They called it assisted suicide: they decided to end the pain by accelerating agony, biting the hand that fed them like never before, until no hand remained to feed them. They were aware that the disappearance of human beings, as individuals or as a species, would probably be only a relief for a planet that, somehow, would surely recover.