Dear Diary: The imagined thoughts of Just Stop Oil

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This week saw the extremist environmentalist group Just Stop Oil stage a desecration of the U.K.’s Stonehenge. Two demonstrators, a 21-year-old and a 73-year-old, ran at the stone monument on the eve of the summer solstice and sprayed it with orange paint.

In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of Just Stop Oil.

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Monday

We here at Just Stop Oil have the humility of knowing that we are the direct ideological descendants of a centuries-long line of changemakers and activists. Like us, our predecessors were not always liked, but we cannot deny the effectiveness of their methods.

Where would we be if Mahatma Gandhi had not urinated on a stack of Shakespeare folios in order to secure Indian independence? Or if William Wilberforce hadn’t abolished the slave trade through his tireless, years-long campaign of going into restaurants and mushing his hands into the meals of random diners?

Free peoples everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1962 stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and screamed hysterically while vandalizing the monument with rancid tomato juice and coal tar.

Tuesday

People think that what we do is easy. That rather than offering any kind of realistic solutions, we merely traffic in the cheap high of wanton cultural destruction. But these naysayers fail to appreciate the work that goes into finding beloved objects to destroy. For instance, we spent months attempting to desecrate high-value modern art with thrown soup, but we had to stop after we realized nobody was noticing.

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What’s more, our campaign of brave direct action has corresponded with a month-over-month reduction in European per-capita emissions. The trendlines are obvious: So long as the desecrations continue, the decarbonization will follow suit.

Wednesday

Our Stonehenge operation today has been a tremendous success. With the mere expenditure of 5 pounds in orange paint, we have earned headlines around the world for our noble and achievable cause of ending all fossil fuel use everywhere immediately.

And this frankly marks a new milestone in our mission. Henceforth, we will be bringing our campaign to a wide variety of irreplaceable ancient artifacts and monuments. Temples, ruins, cave paintings; you name it. The move has been so effective, in fact, that I can’t believe nobody has ever thought of this before. To my knowledge, we are the first people to ever pursue the violent desecration of historical monuments in a bid to impose a new, uncompromising political order.

Thursday

There are times I lament that we can only desecrate physical objects. It is one thing to destroy a cultural treasure, but imagine the potency of our message if we could also destroy dreams, memories or other pleasant intangibles.

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The next time you have a fleeting remembrance of a long-lost grandparent, we could rig it so that your mind was instead overwhelmed with the sounds of a shrill siren for 10 minutes. You know that feeling of sublime joy that washes over you when, after a stressful day, a child says “I love you, mom”? We’d ideally replace that joy with immediate diarrhea and a nosebleed.

Friday

If we have erred in our approach, it’s that we have focused too much on ruining the creations of human hands. By only targeting art and architecture, we are sending the message that it is only the manufactured, artificial world that is valuable.

In the coming months, I hope we can bring our messaging to the natural world in the same way that we’ve brought it to the art world. Shimmering rivers could be rendered lifeless with contaminants. Priceless stands of forest set ablaze. Why focus solely on blocking human commuters when we could work on impeding the migration of salmon or songbirds?

If I had my way, we would enshroud the entire planet with airborne chemicals to trap sunlight, raise temperatures, inhibit agriculture and melt the ice caps. Millions would die, yes, but it would be a small price to pay in order to prevent the much larger tragedy of Just Stop Oil members ever experiencing a single moment of internalized reflection about our miserable, empty loveless, unfulfilled lives.

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