"Hey Jude! Grab the car keys offa the bench will ya?” …”Come on! We’ll be late if we don’t get outa here in the next two minutes”

“So what’s the rush?” said Judy, emerging from the kitchen pulling her socks over the bottoms of her jeans. “Hey. What is the rush?” She wore a pissed-off expression surrounded by frizzy hair pulled back from her face like a sheaf tied twice around with a cotton scarf that hung to her shoulders. She wasn’t big, or small, but strong and well shaped and squinted her eyes like a cave dweller coming out into the snow. “I mean it Bob. What does it matter if we are five minutes late? Don’t hurry me up like I’m so kind of nuisance. Don’t you realize how many meetings we’ve been to in the last month already? She waited momentarily, “Six! And six hundred before that! And what has changed? Hey? So don’t rush me, cause nothing has changed in all the years we’ve been at it; except to get worse!” she told him emphatically, hands on hips. “The green trend amounts to nothing more than talking, more letter writing and lobbying; and gives the impression that something is actually being done, but the lines on the graphs have all gone from horizontal to vertical and plastic buckets full of food scraps or school kids recycling paper bags ain’t gonna make the change!

In another twenty years there’ll be eight billion people driving, eating, and shitting on this planet and what are we going to do then? No Bob, the kinds of changes required are unpopular and mainstream political. Can’t you see that?” She looked him straight in his eyes and waited impatiently for a serious answer. They had both been so involved during the previous couple of years that it was almost an obsession and now that she was pregnant they were even more desperate to do something about the environment. For Jude it hadn’t been a hobby, a past-time, or a means to socialize with the like-minded. She‘d become increasingly focused on green issues since leaving school but had gradually gone deeper until she had finally appeared out the other side. At first the information had been mind expanding, impactive and shocking, but just lately it had passed through zero on the number line and Judy couldn’t help seeing that the crisis could only accelerate until everything stopped. Some would say that she had given up but she had really only come to a conclusion determined by an objective re-assessment of the data unobfuscated by the hippy bullshit and green need for re-enforcement. She’d read so many books about peace and war, Hunzas and Zen, the CIA, NSA, KGB, Mossad, toxic waste, conspiracies, acid rain, de-forestation, cosmic guidance, over-population, arms bazaars, astronomy, cute furry things, the dance of the demi-gods, tantric sex, health, herbs, history, money, love, and life after death, that it had not only served to instill in her a deep respect for the mystery of the abundant beauty of earthly manifestation but also an ever increasing contempt for the human race which culls, kills and clear-fells while generally smothering the whole beautiful organism with their generated shit.

“Do you really think the people with their power are ever going to back off, Bob? Do you really think the average person is going to give up enough of their frantic consumption to make any meaningful difference?” She implored him.

“Oh c’mon Jude, we’ve been through this all before. If we don’t, who will? Everybody has to do their bit. Anyway, I told Dave I’d do some t-shirts for him. Are you ready or what?”

“One simple question, Bob. Do you think that people would be willing to give up their cars even if they had proof that it would make the difference between survival and destruction?”

“Jude, you know that's a purely hyperthetical question.”

“Alright Bob. I’ve had enough, cause you just don’t get it do you. I’m not interested in wasting my hypotheticals any more! Not tonight. Not ever! I’ve done my bit. You think I’m kidding but face it Bob, unless there are some very unpopular decisions made this planet is going straight down the tube and there is nothing you and me or a million more of us can do. The puppet masters are just too powerful and they have in their service the vast majority of the privileged populace of this over-populated world to feed the masters’ hegemonic power by their greed, ignorance, fear and gullibility. The hip pocket nerve is master of the brain. Smart humans hey!  We haven’t found a replacement planet anywhere out there” she said, waving her arm across the span of the doorway, getting a bit dramatic the way she could sometimes, “But already they’re going to trash this one! Forget it Bob. I’m not going anywhere with you tonight. I’ve had enough of the man in the street and his similar wife. Extinction is not a shame; it’s a fucking crime! Did you see that photo in the paper this morning, five politicians planting one tree? Some PR for a grinning mogul being back-slapped for ‘saving’ one kind of duck! No one will come to terms with reality, Bob! We all watch so much TV that we can’t tell when we’re dreaming. It’s all dead space… inside and out …” she said just standing there shaking her head.

“Come on Jude. Are you coming or not?”

They stood there looking at each other until Bob said “seeya later.” and turned to walk out the door.

But of course he didn’t see her later. As sometimes happens, events fell one against the other into a cosmic bottleneck.

This time she was really fed up. Totally disillusioned with the sham. Finished with trying to be the good citizen because she had realized that she was simply contributing to the problem by allowing the planet rapers to give the impression that something was actually being done. “Landcare plants a hundred trees while a corporations and peasants cut ten thousand down. A council drags a few car bodies out of a creek while factories full of robots produce ten shiploads more. A war draws to conclusion in one place while two start elsewhere. Twenty thousand children died while you were asleep last night but  “have a nice day” she said to no one in particular.

Judy had realized that twenty years of consciousness raising had just been wasted time because action requires courage to take risks that most people are just too comfortable to take. “Human nature can be despicable! And if those bastards are going to be supping on champagne in their penthouses while the world rots around them I’m not going to be crawling in the streets like a cockroach fighting over crumbs. I’ll go down fighting. Not farting around with petitions or marching in the street like a trained duck.

So Bob found a cold, dark, and surprisingly empty house when he came in about twelve. He couldn’t believe it. Judy hadn’t taken off to her mother’s for years. “Must be hormones,” he thought, “I’ll call her in the morning.”

But Judy hadn’t gone to her mother’s. Her philosophical realignment had been complete so she could see that the only people not part of the collusion were the outlaws, the real outsiders who instead of being marginalized and povertised by attempting to change the unchangeable they had simply bared their hairy arses  and farted in it’s smug face. She went looking for them who had bitten the bullet. The renegades. At least they saw that the fundamental condition of modern reality increasingly required conscious self-deception by humans inextricably entangled in the business of strange masks and disguises, confronted by mortality and vulnerability and compromised by the fear of being alone, rejected, and alienated. The natural rhythm of genesis and extinction had seized Judy’s consciousness and inevitably led her to represent her emotion in action that demonstrated her disgust for the nightmares of the sleeping sheep. Her fascination with the magnificence of nature had been confronted by the miscarried emptiness of global extinction. The self-consciousness that had previously mocked her attempts at spontaneous action was over-ridden by a loss of belief in the potential goodness of the external world and caused her deep doubts about the authenticity of everything that seemed absurd, criminal, and disassociated by the homogenization of global consumerism as an outgrowth of religion, commerce, and education. Ironic detachment dulled her pain and crippled her will to keep trying to change social conditions to restore meaning and dignity to everyday life. “Fuck it!” she whispered to herself.

By the time Bob had been through his withdrawal from Judy. By the time he’d really searched his soul. When he had looked at the frozen wind-whipped skulls beneath the smiling cosmetics. When he had come to terms with the enormity of the crime in time of killing the only place in the universe that had spawned life and love. When he’d set eyes on the half-bearded, shaven headed pig-like person who’d answered the door, and when he’d heard that Judy had died when the Harley she was riding hit a pole … he seethed with anger; at the bikies, at Judy, at the slimy world of deft deals, corporate images, ubiquitous corruption, and the culture of shortsighted self-serving apathy. He paced, planned, schemed, and searched for a means for revenge; finally realizing that most of all he should be angry with himself for not seeing Judy had been right.