Eat the Rich

Photo by Brody Baker

Fucking rich people. They’re bastards! They think the planet is here for their amusement. From the rich-ass snobs in Britain hunting foxes like it’s a video game to the greedy Americans in their gas-guzzling SUVs, rich people are sending this whole planet straight to fucking hell. How can we wake them up to the fact that they are destroying the planet? Isn’t anyone getting off their asses and doing something about this!?

You bet your ass they are. On Aug. 22, a group affiliated with the Earth Liberation Front decided to take their rage to the streets and blew up a Hummer dealership in West Covina, CA. They spraypainted “Fat, lazy Americans” on the outside of the building just in case you didn’t get it, and then BOOM the shit was torched. God bless them. It’s time the world knew the truth. Rich people and their cars are destroying the planet.

“Er, actually, the problem isn’t really SUVs if you want to get into the mathematical truth of it,” says some idiot named Mark Allan, the head of the North American Environmental Protection Agency. “There’s 148 million other cars that are out there every day doing far more harm simply due to their sheer number.” I had no idea what the fuck Mark was talking about so I told him I had to go. He added: “People want to blame the rich because it’s fashionable, but blaming SUVs for air pollution is like saying one fat, greedy rat ruined your apartment when the floors are covered wall-to-wall with army ants. Unfortunately, it’s the poor that are killing Mother Nature simply because there’s so many of them. Thirty-eight million Toyota Camrys do a lot more damage than two thousand Hummers. Air pollution in America isn’t so much about how cars consume gas. It’s about how many cars consume gas.” I told Mark to fuck off after that and hung up on the bastard. Toyota Camrys are the problem? Why, because poor people drive them? It’s really sad to see the war against the poor leaking into the environmental movement. Soon you’re going to see “experts” saying the foxhunts are really cool and it’s the people on welfare that are killing all the animals.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) is a group of ballsy animal-rights activists dedicated to letting people know the truth about rich bastards who shoot foxes for “sport.” The same way the American elite treat our highways like stretched-out playgrounds for their SUV amusement, rich British cocksuckers are galloping through the countryside with no regard for the dead foxes they leave in their wake. At the Center for Animal Cruelty in Bristol, England, Barbara Roan was happy to explain exactly how evil this sport truly is: “While I believe that hunting foxes in Britain is reprehensible, I think that people tend to focus too much attention on that just because the perpetrators are upper class.” Fuck you, bitch (I thought to myself), but she kept talking shit. “I mean, last year only 25,000 foxes were killed in foxhunts.”

At this point I was so outraged I yelled, “Oh, and I suppose poor people driving Toyota Camrys are more to blame!” into the phone. Barbara was obviously on the bullshit payroll too, because she came out with this crap: “Actually, yes. Roadkills account for the death of 80 million animals a year in Britain and more than five times that in America. The strange thing about this business is nobody wants to discuss numbers. They’re more interested in how cute something is. Like with seal hunting in Canada. Americans rail against the hunts and I support that, but that’s only 280,000 animals a year and the seal population is still thriving. Americans kill 20,000 chickens a minute. Why are we, the animal-rights movement, devoting so many of our resources to the cute animals or the animals that rich people kill? There are far more pressing dangers internationally that nobody is discussing, and I’m not just talking about endangered species. In China, for example, 2001 was the Year of the Snake and they killed millions of these reptiles for silly superstitions like adding snake tongues to an exotic drink. The snake population was devastated there, when only a few years before it had been thriving. Of course, the media doesn’t want to hear that because images of dead snakes don’t trigger people’s sympathy the way images of baby seals do. It’s all about how much they resemble a cartoon. Here in our office, one of the more cynical staff members put a word balloon on a poster we have that depicts a baby seal. It says, ‘Don’t kill me. I have big eyes.’ I was so angry at his callousness that I couldn’t even look at it when I first got here, but the more I learn about this culture the more profound his joke becomes. I don’t know what most people’s agendas are when they talk about animal rights, but to be honest, it rarely seems to be predicated on saving the most animals possible.” Despite being angrier than I have ever been in my life, I refrained from fire-bombing Barbara’s building. She is a stupid cow who has been brainwashed by the fat cats in Washington—an elite group of corrupt politicians that would happily wipe out the poor if they could. A group that will do anything to divert your eyes from the fucking truth: Fat, rich, lazy Americans are the reason this, our earth, is going up in smoke. Everything they do hurts our planet more than a million poor people could ever dream of. Who do you think does all the recycling in this country? The millionaires in Beverly Hills? Yeah, right. They couldn’t give two shits about conserving our resources. I asked Adam Silcoff of Michigan’s Land Preservation Society what we can do to force those rich bastards to wake up and take care of their garbage, and he seemed to be on the same corporate crack-pipe everyone else was on. “Well, the truth is,” he paused like a true ass, “more and more environmentalists are starting to realize that recycling is a Band-Aid solution. Think of it like this: Humans are to the earth what a parasite is to your body. Your body can handle one or two, but when they’re covering 90 percent of you it doesn’t matter how civil and kind they are. They’re parasites. Some are bigger than others, but that’s not the problem. A living being simply cannot handle a virus covering that much of their body.”

Another fucking idiot full of shit. Goodbye! It seems the more environmentalists I spoke to the more I got the same old shit. “People are the problem—not what they do.” It was like they were saying the best way to save the world was to have a fucking abortion. Like Michael Roan, a self-described “environmental statistician,” dared to say to me, “The thing about giving birth is, that’s one person who will then have two children, who will then have two or more children. Within three generations you may have multiplied your strain on the environment five times over. That means you are five times more taxing on the planet than you would be if you didn’t have kids. Now, you can recycle and drive a fuel-efficient car and only eat tofu, but the point is, someone who has multiplied themselves five times over can never be as easy on the environment as someone who hasn’t, no matter how many token recycling gestures they come up with.”

That’s when I totally lost it. I said, “Okay, Mr. Roan, so you’re saying that if a rich person who drives an SUV, goes on foxhunts and never recycles, decides he’s not going to have kids, then he’s better than me—a vegetarian, with one kid, who recycles and has never so much as killed a fly?”

“Environmentally speaking?” the idiot replied. “As far as Mother Nature is concerned, she would much rather tolerate the childless rich person. In the long run she’s better off with him.” I was so dumbfounded by this guy’s stupidity I hung up the phone in disbelief. Then I went over to my son who was sleeping on the couch. I looked at him and swore I would never let him or his brothers and sisters or any of their children or any of their children’s grandchildren or any of their grandchildren’s children’s children turn out like the oblivious buffoons I had talked to on the phone today.

ANDY BRYANT