…
“Cindy, I want to talk about you trying to hurt yourself this morning.”
Miss Bailout, the school psychiatrist, isn’t really a trained doctor. She just got tired of teaching logic and math to bears who really needed health and guidance.
“Um, Miss Bailout, I didn’t really try to hurt myself. I was just conducting an experiment and using myself as the guinea pig.”
Miss Bailout pauses to study Cindy’s body language carefully to scan for more information than spoken text which – she has learned – is relatively easy to fake.
“Cindy, you ran up ANWAR Hill and jumped a passing oil truck. This experimentation explanation isn’t going to convince your parents when you get home, and it doesn’t convince me very much either.”
“Oh my god! Don’t tell my parents about this!! We just moved to our fifth igloo in two years, and dad’s coming out party really freaked my mom. This could drive them over the edge!”
Miss Bailout nods and smiles professionally: “Don’t worry. The school doctor says you don’t even need any medical follow-up. Except… well, except I think you should have some psychological follow-up, and that’s why I called you in to my office. Tell me what motivated you to risk your life to scare a truck driver.”
“Okay. Well, last week, we learned in Modern World Problems about how humans destroyed the world and got attacked by all the other animals as they were all going extinct. So that got me thinking: what if we polar bears do the same thing? What if we get so enslaved by our own daily routines that we forget about the really important but banal facts of life? What if we get so scared of nature and of dying that we end up destroying the earth with our technology and consumption?”
Miss Bailout scrunches up her eyebrows and pulls on one of her long whiskers. “Well, I guess that could happen, Cind. But even if this does happen – and I hope it doesn’t – how could jumping onto an oil truck and laying across the windshield help prevent it?”
Cindy speaks quickly, as if she has been writing a manifesto. “If I can show everyone that I’m not afraid of dying, then maybe everyone can see that it’s alright to die, and so they’ll let everyone and everything else… live.”
The school psychiatrist scribbles something into her black velvet binder.
After a long pause, Cindy hands back her youth distress questionnaire: “Listen, Miss Bailout, I just want people to know that fear is worse than anything you can be afraid of. Humans, with all their fears and defenses, were just dinosaurs part two.”
Miss Bailout rises from her seat and walks towards the door to let Cindy out. “It’s true that humans and dinosaurs were similar. But not us, Cindy. Dinosaurs didn’t have guidance counselors like us Pee Bears!”
**Miss Bailout makes the volleyball team’s Pee Bear sign with three fingers**
Tags: "A People's History or the World" Chris Harman, "Live is life" Opus, applied technology, civilization collapse, collapse, community, ecocide, experimenting on yourself, guidance, learning history, martyrdom, nihilism, slavehood and civilization, social hierarchy
