Fourteen 109

FOURTEEN #109

tl by molokidan

147)
Chapter Four
The Earth in Peril[16]

148)
1: I think it was America who pushed the earth to its death!!
2: If we look back, America has been the spearhead of environmental destruction.
3: First, we trampled over the continent known as America.
4: Then, we pushed numerous indigenous species to extinction!!

149)
1: Please, though, you must forgive us...for we believed that nature was an infinite thing.
2: America has charged forward in the name of freedom and justice.
3: Thinking about it now, however, we were only thinking about our own freedom, and justice was just an excuse in order to protect that.
4: An enemy was necessary for us to have justice!! And therefore we caused problems for many other countries.

150)
1: America always had to be #1 in the world. We're the first ones who used the atomic bomb.
2: When we dropped the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, our intelligence called those places the modern Sodom and Gomorrah, and didn't show the least bit of regret.
3: Our attitude toward the sacrifices remained the same, but was now coupled with an utter ignorance of the effect the atomic calamity had to the entire earth -- the epitome of stupidity and hubris!!
4: And now, we finally realize that it was all connected to the one and only planet we live on, our mother earth.

151)
1: How many times have we hurt our mother up until this point?!
2: The countless atomic experiments we did both above and underground were all cruel, heartless rebellions against our earth!!

152)
1: Afterwards, because of America's economic decline, we changed our focus toward widespread industrialization. Massive cities, trash disposal tunnels into the magma, giant dams, mammoth power plants...America did its best to stay on top of the world.
2: And it ran the earth into the ground!!

153)
1: No!! This is Europe's fault!!
2: Europe cast away all who didn't belong to its upper-class society to America.
3: We were the first to stain the earth with our development of factories. And all the while, we believed we were the wisest ones on the planet.
4: If you look around, you'll spot not one mountain in all of Europe. We didn't notice!! We didn't notice that all the air we were breathing for free was being created in the other places we looked down on.

154)
1: We conquered as much as we could, and used up as much as we could!
2: And I would like to apologize from the bottom of my heart to Africa!!

155)
1: Please forgive us!!
2: With the powerful combined strength of the unified EC, there was no place on the earth we weren't able to reach!!
3: And we never thought that it would all come back to bite us!!

156)
1: I'm sorry!!
2: No, Japan is the one who must apologize here!!
3: Japan is such a small country, yet it began developing an economy and called itself an economic power...
4: Buying up as much as it could, creating as much as it could.

157)
1: As a result, we created an immense amount of trash, and were called the country of trash behind our backs. Then we tried to change our country into a commodity power, but that just ended up creating even more trash.
2: Then Japan started having problems as to what to do with its trash, so in the name of returning what we got from the earth back to it, we came up with the idea to plunge trash into the magma. It all started with the volcanic country of Japan.

158)
1: Japan used to be hated by the entire world!! But Japan couldn't understand why, no matter how hard we thought!!
2: It was only after the Great Tokyo Earthquake smashed everything to pieces that we realized the fact that Japan's politicians possessed only rulers to measure the two entities known as law and money!! And we realized that we possessed not longer possessed a single art to leave to the world. But Japan has repeated the same thing numerous times. We continued with our great developments just like before...forgetting something very important!!

159)
1: Then we finally realized. We had forgotten a third ruler, one that is meant to measure "aesthetics!"
2: We should possess a ruler to measure aesthetics along with law and money!!

160)
1: Law without aesthetics is a lie!! Money without aesthetics is evil!! Science without aesthetics is destruction!! Education without aesthetics is trash!!
2: Japan was hated by the world for this very reason!! And so we soiled the earth!!
3: It's not just you, all of Asia is guilty of this!!
4: Now that I think about it, all we've ever done is spoken badly of Japan!! But it's the same as speaking badly about ourselves.
5: All we've ever thought about was in regard to our own lives!!
6: We may have even felt that words about aesthetics would be shameful.

161)
1: The countries of the west surely thought about Asia in this way!! But no one would actually come out and say it!!
2: Filthy!! Low class!!
3: Ugly!! Barbaric!!
4: It was all the same to us, so we didn't notice!!
5: When we were actually the ones in the perfect position to discover new culture and aesthetics!!
6: Uuuuuu.
7: Please forgive what I am about to say.
8: But you're absolutely right!!

162)
1: We believed that we were special from the moment we were born, and were drowned in ourselves, saying whatever we liked whenever we liked. We believed that it was our right!! But we never realized that what is right is not always aesthetic.
2: If only we would have noticed sooner...
3: slam
4: our earth might not have had to die!!