Happy Earth Day! Better known as “You Should Be Dead Day”. The day when people all over the globe celebrate how wonderful the earth would be if you were dead.

And I don’t mean just you.

Because just you being dead wouldn’t do much for the planet. Unless you flush your toilet excessively in which case, you should probably be dead.

But not if you’re a ridiculously wealthy, famous Eco Warrior of Environmental Justice. Or just being ridiculously wealthy and famous suffices. That way you don’t have to be dead because you get to tell everyone else who should be dead.

Like Margaret Sanger who said, “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” Now I don’t know if the founder of Planned Parenthood was rich, but I think she was pretty famous. Just not famous enough for you and me to be dead… yet.

Remember that other famous guy, Jacques Cousteau?  He thought you should be dead too.

His thoughts on taking care of Mother Earth amounted to “World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.” I wonder if you’re supposed to volunteer or if someone just gets to pick your name from a hat? 350,000 people per day. Now that’s a pretty big hat.

But not as big as the one you would need if we were to make about 6.5 billion people dead. Keeping the number of the un-dead on earth at about 500 million is what some anonymous people with money think the number should be.  Maybe their names are in that hat which is why they don’t want to be famous.

Hard to say.

Which is why I think having gobs of money helps even more than being famous. Then you get to erect huge walls of stone in Georgia while you hide in a luxurious cave somewhere. But rich and famous is still a pretty good combo.

Take a guy like Prince Charles who has something like 10,000 houses all over the world, offices, shops, and property to boot. Do you know why he’s not supposed to be dead? Because he’s worth about $210 million and he has lots of stuff. That’s why he can’t be dead. Besides, he needs places to live and you can’t be in those places because then where would he live. Right?

Meanwhile, you’re throwing eggshells on a compost pile in your backyard, shutting off the lights in rooms when you’re not in them, and cutting up the plastic rings from your six pack of beer so Snuffy the sea turtle doesn’t get strangled in one.

That’s exactly how I see Bill Gates skipping around his 66,000 square foot home, yelling at people to turn off the lights in any of the twenty-four bathrooms or saying something like, “Close the window! What are you trying to do, heat up the outside?”  as he cuts up the plastic rings from his six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The same Bill Gates who has his calculator out saying “The world has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

See? If he can get more people to be dead, then all the better. All people have to do is get vaccinated, stop by a health care clinic, or kill their own children, and voila! Utopia!

Or, maybe one of the co-founders of Earth Day,  Ira Einhorn, had a better idea. He simply killed then composted his girlfriend.  So she is not only dead but she’s also earth-friendly.

So why don’t these Eco Warriors of Environmental Justice make themselves dead? Wouldn’t that be a good answer?

Well no.

Because unlike you and me — oxygen-breathing, carbon-emitting, inconsequential bi-peds — the Eco Warriors of Environmental Justice need to stick around to make sure all the compost gets put to good use.

And then they can flush their toilets all they want.