Article - Evil likes company

By Stanley Collymore

I do love to be at the seaside, taking in and massively enjoying the vagaries of the sea or the open ocean, dependent in which part of the world I happen to be in. But characteristically, and without exception, I do passionately detest the unwarranted intrusion of others who calculatingly could not care less about the invasion of privacy that they selfishly and arrogantly cause to people like me.

And who by their loud and persistent noise, either through witless chatter on their mobile phones or in utterly meaningless diatribes with one another which only they and they alone can decipher, compound this discernibly destructive invasion of their by wilfully despoiling often pristine and attractive locations they come across with their infernal clutter of carelessly discarded and grotesquely unsightly litter.

Which, self-evidently, to them doesn’t matter a jot whether it’s recyclable or not, nor indeed, come to that, the catastrophic harm that will needlessly be occasioned by them to numerous and highly vulnerable marine creatures that for millennium after millennium have consistently, and prior to the advent of Homo sapiens, not only in concert with nature inhabited and constructively utilized the land surfaces and atmospheric regions of planet Earth itself but also its seas and oceans.

So please, urgently stop for once and seriously consider what it is that you’re senselessly doing to vulnerably exposed communities or perceptive individuals like me, but equally so and specifically as well myriads of marine creatures that, in normal circumstances, happily inhabit the earth’s oceans, land-based waterways and seas; and which in millennia terms have a much more conclusive right to be here on this earth than either you or me.

Since their ongoing presence amongst us, respectively, massively predates our very own comparatively recent appearance on earth historically. And they’ve existed this long in their particular environments because they’ve skilfully learnt to sensibly and pragmatically adjust to them, and not sought to radically alter or even idiotically destroy existing ones as is so transparently commonplace with supposedly know-all Homo sapiens.

I’ve never thought at any past stage in my life, nor will I ever be persuaded to think so far less actually believe that as human beings we are essentially and, furthermore, inescapably who we are and must therefore forever remain that way. A direct consequence, as it were, of the strict preordination of our personal and seemingly irreversible circumstances explicitly determined by our own respective birth.

Categorically, it’s a notion I don’t buy; nor will I ever be tempted to do so. However, you’re perfectly at liberty to do so in respect of yourself if you choose to do so.

None the less, what I confidently know and earnestly believe is that we’re all of us supposedly human beings personally endowed with the capability, either for better or worse, to essentially and even fundamentally change who and what we are. And in doing so must also realistically equip ourselves with both the requisite common sense as well as the necessary courage to boldly take and fully accept total responsibility not only for our individual but also our collective actions.

Not only in relation to how such activities affect us personally or each other in the communities that we either live in or are individually familiar with but also the wider world generally, both in terms of the various life forms – animals as well as plants – plus inorganic structures like evolved landscapes and other formations, and most particularly so the live inhabitants of our waterways, seas and oceans. And significantly in such calculations doing so not exclusively, or even simply, from the narrow perspective born of the arrogant and narcissistic demands of us Homo sapiens.