Carol

Look at Carol.

Carol lives in an apartment which was built with cement which comes from a factory which billows pollutants into the air. From stone which is gashed out of the earth. With wood which comes from the clearance of African jungles. She eats with metal cutlery which is made by polluting factories, drinks from plastic cups which are made by polluting factories, with plastic which is made from oil which is sucked from the ground in the Arabian Desert by dictators who slaughter women and children. She wears clothes which are stitched together by the hands of modern-day slaves in Vietnam. She wears boots which are made from the skins of dead animals. She eats chickens who are born, pumped full of steroids and killed having lived the entirety of their short, painful lives in a box and on a conveyor belt. She drinks water from plastic bottles. She eats bananas which are grown on vast plantations which used to be lush rainforest.

And she doesn’t worry about any of this.

She doesn’t care about any of it.

Carol tries to be nice to everyone, even people she deeply dislikes. Never mind the fact that this behavior is fake, that she’s being dishonest with herself. Never mind that for now. What gets me is that she thinks this makes her a good person. She’s happy enough to live in a world which fucks over the most defenseless people and creatures in the most obscene manner imaginable, and to enjoy the fruits of this, but as long as she is polite to the rude woman at the deli counter, she thinks she is moral. As long as she doesn’t do drugs or drink too much, she’s a good person. As long as she doesn’t bitch about people behind their backs, she’s doing the right thing.

But in the next breath she will be topping up her tea with milk from a cow who has been forced to be pregnant her whole life. She’ll walk around carrying make-up which was rubbed in the eyes of rabbits, and carry it in the skin of a dead cow. But that’s fine as long as her dead cow bag matches her dead cow boots.

I want to scream at her – you are the worst kind of evil! At least if you admitted that how you live your life is on the back of misery, you’d be honest, at least honest about it. But the fact that you think you are a good person makes me want to drive in a lorry load of dead cows and dump them at her feet and shout - look what you have done!

My name is Carol.