A satellite picture of a web of cities taking over the greenery.
Six dead crocodiles and above them men with guns, fists raised triumphantly over the beaten animals.
Rows and rows of cut off tusks, fins, stretched out skins.
“It destroys itself…”
A junkie in dirty rags lying on a street, clearly high, with a needle still jabbed into his forearm.
An overweight middle-aged man forcing an entire burger into his mouth, his eyes set intently on a full plate in front of him.
“… and others.”
A CCTV clip showing a masked person aiming a gun at a woman behind a bank counter.
A plane flying into a high-rise building.
A guy clutching his heart, collapsing in the middle of a pedestrian crowd; people stepping right over him and walking on without a second glance.
“What if mankind has become the cancer of this planet?”
A ditch full of dead human bodies, a row of soldiers sitting nearby.
“We spread like cancerous cells…”
A crowded street. A traffic jam on a five-lane highway. A web of an incredible number of planes over Europe.
“We advance in all directions and destroy everything in their path, sucking the life out of Earth and leaving only pain and devastation behind.”
A landfill. Rubbish as far as the eye can see.
A dried-out lake, looking forsaken without any water in it.
A kangaroo carcass pulled away from the road so as not to be in the way of cars.
A starving African child with a bloated stomach.
Prison cells filled with men and women in their respective uniforms.
Politicians sleeping at a meeting.
A woman tied to a poll, naked and clearly tortured, her face twisted by pain.
Another woman with a face burned by acid.
A man kicking a dog chained to a tree.
“Cancer must be eradicated.”
The bleak music stopped and the screen went black. The last four words were pronounced carefully, with great emphasis. Did I just imagine it, or was there a sense of threat in them? I shivered.
“I’d like to watch it again,” Connie said and pressed play one more time. Her voice was strangely muted, she was frowning and her eyes were glossy.
Through life and Connie’s work, I have heard a lot about the consequences of indifference, psychological and physical torture and abuse, but I still couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen.
Was it wrong that I agreed with the final statement? How many times have I wished that all the evil in people and caused by people would disappear? But it was a part of us just as much as goodness… and while there are people, there will be evil too. It was a vicious circle without a solution. I let out a sigh. That’s why those like Connie joined the system, to fight against violence. But no matter how hard they worked, they could never stop it. Desire for power and possessions, arrogance, cowardice, cruelty… All of this was just as deeply rooted in human character as love, devotion, the need to protect one’s family and be safe. These polar opposites will always be at war.
People are the cancer of the planet.
Cancer must be eradicated.
The image of men cutting down trees came back to me. It very well could have been me standing there… And the woman behind the bank counter. My stomach turned looking at the gun pointing at her.
“What do you think it means, Dad?” my daughter asked. Her forehead crinkled and her eyebrows pulled together in deep thought.
“Nothing good will come off of it, that’s for sure.”
She put away her laptop, reached for a mug of now lukewarm tea and I realised that I hadn’t drunk much myself. The contents of the video disturbed me and occupied my thoughts.
“Do you think that this Collective really plans an attack against the government?”
“No idea. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it did come to that.”
“Who would?” she said bitterly after a while and shrugged. “It’s awful, the stuff that’s happening in the world; the video didn’t cover even half of the issues… Global warming, the meat market, corruption, abuse of power. Murders, rapes, paedophilia. And what are politicians doing about all this? Nothing. Too busy lining their own pockets! Regular people can make some difference, but not much… We need actual leaders, not the idiots who hold power now.”
The video clearly affected Connie just as strongly as me. And what about those seventeen million views and an intense reaction the news reporter mentioned? She didn’t say what side the viewers leaned on, but I had a pretty good idea. Nobody ever said life on the planet is too idyllic, that we needed a bit more cruelty.
Maybe that was the point of the video. To inspire the public to create change, start a protest and get things moving. The Collective didn’t have to do anything else now, just sit back and watch.
Connie and I kept talking about the video and the overall message for a good while. Like so many times before, we started talking about rights and wrongs. My daughter couldn’t bear animal cruelty and that, combined with ethical and environmental issues surrounding meat and dairy production, lead her to become first a vegetarian and then a vegan. I hadn’t gone that far, but agreed with her and consumed animal products only as a treat; meat wasn’t an everyday thing for me anymore.
But trying to inspire people to try harder and be kinder has only led to good people being even better and trying harder, and the others remaining just as blind and indifferent as before.
I doubted either of us would get much sleep tonight because of the video, the car crash, and my daughter’s mysterious preoccupation last week. I knew she was locking herself in her bedroom all the time to be alone with whatever worry she was dealing with. Either that, or she suddenly needed more sleep than a newborn.
“Dad,” she said after a while, “I think you were right. I need to take a break from work, it’s been too much for me lately.”
I nodded in relief.
“I’ll take tomorrow off,” she
