As Told By Melissa

My sister-in-law's sister wrote this on Facebook and I thought it was so funny I just had to repost here for my friends to read. Enjoy.

*Note: Dear Grandma, I did not write the F word, my friend did. I am praying for her as I repost this and laughing my ass of.



Ok, so here in Austin there is ample opportunity to be annoyed by bumper stickers, so you basically have to turn off your analytical mind while driving, or else you'll give yourself an ulcer. But today, I saw one that really drove me crazy. It said, "The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth." Why does this make my head explode a little bit? It makes no fucking sense AND the conclusions you can draw from its propositions are actually harmful.

Let's examine this. Proposition 1: The earth does not belong to us. Ok. Fine. The person is trying to express that we should stop trashing it. There are a couple problems here. A. People tend to take better care of their own property than they do of community property, so I'm more likely to litter on someone else's land than my own land. Maybe if the earth did belong to "us" we'd be more careful with it. B. Available empirical evidence DOES seem to suggest that the earth belongs to many of us. I know my parents have property titles. They also don't pour used motor oil on their own ground. (You should see them dumping barrels of crude on our neighbors' land though! Hilarious.) Now the ocean on the other hand, that doesn't really belong to anyone, so who is supposed to be keeping it clean? Community property is almost always a victim of free riders if it's not properly regulated. If I owned the ocean, I'd make damn sure that no one was overfishing it, so as to preserve its value.

Proposition 2: We belong to the earth. Now this is certainly the most obnoxious part, because it makes zero sense. A. Prove it. B. Ok, you're trying to say that when we die we all eventually return to the earth in some way, like as ashes or in the form of our blood running through the streets... Yeah, but this doesn't disprove that we own the earth, because when you die you relinquish your property rights anyway. So we can in fact die, having owned the earth, and then pass on our ownership to someone else. C. Let's say the earth DOES own us. The earth is a shitty property manager. If I were the earth and I owned all the humans, I'd evict about half of them. Now you may say, yees yees, that is what the earth is trying to do with hurricanes and shit. But then the earth is just stupid, because its really not targeting its enemies very well. People who tend to die from natural disasters are often people who are pretty darn poor and lacking in transportation away from said disaster, and you know what else poor people often do? (When possible) They conserve their scarce resources.

Now if I were to go find this lovely Whole Foods patron who so naively displays this illogical car art, and explain to her that her reasoning is flawed and actually counterproductive, I'm guessing she might employ some sort of interpretive dance hand motions to express to me that I'm missing the point because there is some sort of spiritual, communal vibe to it. Ok, whatever. So maybe I'm "reading too much into it." Well you know what? You're the one who posted this crap on your car for ALL to see, whether they want to or not, with some sort of childish hope that maybe one person would refuse that plastic bag at the grocery store or donate to Green Peace. Let's not dumb down these conversations. Let's admit that pragmatic solutions to problems, like well-defined property rights and regulatory bodies who actually have some sort of bite to them, are a good way to preserve the value of the earth's resources. Don't even get me started on all the terrible environmental destruction that has occurred in Africa (oil and water), the Phillipines (forests), and Brazil (forests) as a result of a few temporary politicians raping the resources that belong to "the state" and then retiring to the Bahamas or wherever. Oh also, take a look at the Iraq constitution where it says that "the oil belongs to the Iraqi people." Right.

So in conclusion, fuck bumper stickers.