SAVE THE ECONOMY!

Photo: David Suzuki Foundation

I speak to you today because our ever-growing economy is under threat of growing not quite so very much. Due to direct human action and cheapskate millennials, global wondering is causing you to challenge corporate greed, question the incessant need for stuff and ask yourselves whether slightly higher taxes might be worth it to save the planet.

How dare you! You have stolen my dreams of a new iPhone 11 with your empty RadioShacks! Yet I am one of the lucky ones. CEOs are suffering. People aren’t buying. Entire economic systems are collapsing (mostly downtown cores). We are in the beginning of a mall extinction, and all you can talk about is Monet and fairy tales of life continuing on earth after 2030. How dare you! And, honestly: what’s with the Monet talk?

There are those who deny that the economy is in crisis. But the science is crystal clear. Or is it the humanities? A lot of guesswork, really. But if we don’t act now and then again shortly thereafter, the economy will do something! Or nothing! That’s how the economy is! Which is why we must appease the economy at all times.

The economy must never be made to feel the slightest bit of discomfort, just like us. If, for example, we make the cost of heating homes with fossil fuels prohibitive, people might be forced to put on a sweater, and the economy hates sweaters, especially those ugly Christmas ones.

And certainly we cannot even think about legislating corporations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, because that would hurt the economy’s feelings. Don’t you remember how long it took the economy to get over the Great Depression of 1929 and the Overdramatic Pout of 2008?

We must do all we can to protect the economy. We must shield the economy from people who look or sound different or who practice different religions or who have off-putting beard dandruff or who read Kindles on public transit because how are you supposed to judge people if you can’t see what book they’re reading?

Instead, we must continue taking on more and more debt to keep the economy in great shape, with veins popping out of its arms, staring at itself in the mirror, saying “bro” a lot, intimidating all the micro-economies, not wiping down the equipment after use.

If we don’t constantly validate the economy by offering handouts to corporations, we’ll only have ourselves to blame when the economy locks itself in the bedroom and blasts Slipknot on its soon-to-be-obsolete Bluetooth speaker while Googling “sexy Koch brothers.”

We must in no way put a strain on the economy. We must do the economy’s laundry for it and never, ever ask the economy to lend a hand by maybe doing the dishes from time to time. Don’t mess with the economy when “Fuller House” is on. If the economy wants a big bowl of lukewarm mayonnaise to rub all over the stock market, we better hop to it, condiment-wise.

But most of all, when push comes to cataclysmic weather events, we must save the economy. As the oceans rise, we must gently relocate the economy to higher ground while sweetly cooing 1970s soft-rock classics in the economy’s ear.

As temperatures soar, the economy must be kept in air-conditioned surroundings at all times, ironically known as “climate-control.”

As animal and plant species disappear in waves of extinction, we must ensure that the economy will still, without thinking of the environmental impact, be able to get in the car to drive to the zoo, which will, of course, be empty.

As people flee the ravages of climate change in the largest mass movement in human history, we must guarantee the right of the economy to continue ordering tremendous deals from Amazon with free shipping.

Unless we stop threatening the economy with actions to save the planet, we will reach a tipping point that will set off irreversible chain store reactions beyond human control.

We can no longer do something. If we are to save our economy, we must do nothing.

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency to buy as much as possible on Black Friday and also Cyber Monday. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that you would dare ask me to give up plastic straws. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to build more pipelines, then you would be evil. And that I do not buy.

Although I would buy it. For the economy.