Butterflies
Be An Organ Donor
You’ll almost certainly be dead anyway.
I can’t speak for everyone but after I die I’m going to use my body less often than at present. Much as I like my heart valves, fond as I am of my corneas, close as I am to my skin, I anticipate being able to do without them post-life. My heart will have stopped beating. My kidneys will have stopped kidneying. My bowel had better be out of service or I’m getting buried with a peg on my nose. It seems wasteful to take these perfectly usable bits and pieces and burn them or bury them in the ground. Happily there’s a solution: We can recycle ourselves. We can be organ donors.
We can give our kidneys, hearts, heart valves, livers, lungs, pancreases, small bowels, skin, corneas and bones to any bugger passing, and any bugger will get to live. If you’re currently alive you can donate bone marrow right now. Our transplanted corneas could restore the sight of someone with a severe eye disease or injury. Our donated bone could help prevent limb amputation in patients with bone cancer. Our donated skin could help patients with severe burns. Our heart valves could help children born with heart defects or adults with diseased or damaged valves.
That’s a big bunch of amazing things we can do. Unfortunately, humans remain largely shit so people were left to die while non-donors were buried with their bodies intact. In the UK this prompted a shift to opt-out rather than opt-in systems, so instead of being bothered to join the organ donor register people in England and Wales now have to be bothered to join the list of refusers. If they don’t, we’re nicking their kidneys! At the time of writing, Scotland is aiming to switch to an opt-out system in March 2021, while Northern Ireland is having a bit of a think about it. In the meantime you can register as a Scottish or Northern Irish donor right now. Americans can also register right now, while the other 192 of you can get Googling on how to go about it.
And before you get uppity about sharing your corneas or bowels remember you could find yourself in need of a top up. The next time we drive into a tree and find our lungs flung through the windscreen we’ll be hoping somebody somewhere has a set going spare so we get to live some more.
Be an organ donor
You'll have carked it anyway
And other people will get to live!
Zeroism
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Did you say Kiva or Miva?
The thing with this do-gooding lark is it’s a difficult habit to break. Once you’ve committed to a life of meddling, Butterflying and getting stuck in there’s no backing down, no slacking off, no chance of respite or downtime. So although I’ve been on holiday for a couple of weeks and not actively Zeroing, my do-gooding hasn’t let up a bit.
I am not a free man; I am a number
You will recall one of my new year’s resolutions was to run a 10K for charity, an effort of such clichéd lameness I may as well have joined Weight Watchers while downing a pack of Jammie Dodgers. Since then I have been absolutely bombarded by one request for an update, and only a fool would deny the wishes of his entire audience.
The running man
And so to new year resolutions, a pointless exercise given my current greatness but one I dabble in for the sake of my inferiors and their fully justified inferiority complexes. The challenge here is to find some tiny improvement I can make somewhere. After all, even history’s great humans have had to tweak the odd thing here and there. Rumour has it every January Ghandi would make a fresh effort to cut down on crack.
Social networking not working
One of the difficulties about this changing the world lark is it’s not really on me to change. I’ve already ascended to moral perfectuality, leaving you and others in an ethical gutter like the thoughtless wasters you are. It’s all about getting you to catch up now, inspiring you to positive change by slagging you off and calling you gutter-dwelling thoughtless wasters.
And so the call goes out: Meddle
Life is all about the meddling. It’s all about the getting stuck in and the not just standing by murmuring to yourself about how things shouldn’t be like this and how if only someone would do something maybe things would be etc. If Zeroism is about anything – and it isn’t – it’s about how we have to be the stucker inners.
The foul stench of failure: closely resembles worm poop
And so to the latest adventures with the wormery. You’ll recall how in the absence of a garden I couldn’t get a composter and how I’d gone for an indoor wormery that would turn worms into my slaves, forcing them to eat my scraps and poop out a rich, nourishing compost. It’s not been the most successful of my many successful successes.
Left cheek unused in uncharacteristically weak effort
It can be hard at times, fitting Zeroism into a busy life. Turns out this whole masters thing is less about watching Supermarket Sweep and more about reading every word ever written about social work. Meanwhile the world’s missed out on a blog entry and my usual epic do-gooding, delaying the revolution for 7 days and putting us back to October 2014. But while changing the world from the confines of the library is not without its challenges, it can be done. I’ve spent the week signing online petitions.
Wonder boy
The whole point of this Zero lark is that with a little bit of thought we can do good in whatever we happen to be doing, be it eating a banana (Fairtrade/organic), eating veal (not doing) or embezzling funds from a Lebanese orphanage (carbon offsetting your extradition flight). And so it is for yer man today as he starts back at university.
(Blank) sweat and tears
We find ourselves in the middle of National Blood Donor Week and it’s given me an idea:
Instead of always referring to seven consecutive days commencing with Monday and ending with Sunday as ‘seven consecutive days commencing with Monday and ending with Sunday’ I’m going to start calling that period of time ‘a week’. That’s what I’ve been doing this week and so far it’s been going down pretty well.
