Turkeys do vote for Christmas

As a mostly vegetarian household, the recent outbreak of bird flu in Suffolk (UK) was seen here as more of a turkey style humanitarian disaster than a threat to the Sunday dinner table. It seems somehow symptomatic of society's cock-eyed view of the world that culling 159,000 turkeys in the interests of protecting human health goes pretty much unquestioned as being a right and proper course of action. Reaction to this bird-flu induced slaughter seems to have been governed here mostly by the inherent self interest of humankind or in some cases a certain sympathy for workers at Bernard Matthews who have been at risk of infection or lost their jobs as a result of the ensuing slump in turkey sales.

Now it's not that I don't appreciate the logic of all this, given the risk of the H5N1 virus mutating into a form capable of wiping millions off the human population, although it might just be one of the less humane but more viable way of reducing carbon emissions. No, my point is who speaks for the turkeys? Especially the one's that weren't infected, that might have been infected or were just at risk of infection. The most I've heard people say is that they were going to be slaughtered anyway, you know it was just like Christmas came a bit early for them. Only the turkeys didn't get a vote. They never do. But if they did, what would they do? Wisdom has it they wouldn’t vote for Christmas and they sure as hell wouldn't vote for it to come early.

Now I may be struggling to make a connection here but the washingqueen made me feel a bit like a turkey voting for Christmas when I signed the online petition on the Number 10 website asking the government to introduce carbon rationing. "Why on earth would you want to do that?" she asked incredulously, "bring all the misery of rationing upon us voluntarily?" "Because if we don't act now…" I began but knew I was wasting my breath. Last time I looked I was one of about two thousand citizens signed up to support this petition. Compare that with close on TWO MILLION people who signed up to protest at the vaguest threat of introducing road pricing in the battle against congestion and transport emissions. Clearly the unimpeded right to use our cars and emit carbon irrespective of greenhouse gases or congestion is far more important. And given all the scientific concensus about the impact of continuing such a business as usual approach, I can only conclude that these two million good citizens really are turkeys voting for Christmas and voting for it to come early. Not only that, but given the irreversible nature of the changes taking place and the fact that the full consequences of our self interested action will be visited upon future generations, we're not just voting for Christmas for ourselves, but casting votes for an early Christmas for our children and grandchildren too. Collectively we seem to have even less sense than the turkeys we slaughter. All the while believing we're acting in our own best interests. What capacity for delusion.