The Kangaroo and the Usurper

More information on the pending legislation: http://www.ozpolitic.com/sustainability-party/kangaroo-law.html

The desert was encroaching on my farm. With their cruel, hard hooves the cows were turning the fragile soil to dust, which blew away in the dry and eroded on the rare occasion it rained. They ripped grass out by the roots, further weakening the soil. They also farted. Not just for a joke either. They farted huge quantities of methane gas, which heated up the earth. That’s why it didn’t rain any more. The few waterholes left in the creek were invaded by herds of cattle, who turned the banks into mud bogs with their clumsy steps, destroying the delicate riparian vegetation and fragile aquatic ecosystems. Something had to be done, but what?

Then it struck me. Or rather I nearly struck it, but I swerved just in time. Gradually, my plan took form, until one day when I encountered what appeared to be an insurmountable obstacle: California had been usurped by a massive Austrian bloke with an uzi who talked real slow and liked to blow things up. Kangaroo imports had been banned (except for the kangaroo leather boots worn by the usurpers troops while kicking hippies). Instead, they were torturing baby cows, then grinding them up, slapping the patty between two sesame seed buns with some special sauce and force feeding it to his subjects. The high fat content and low nutritional value was causing an epidemic of obesity. People were dieing cruel, horrible deaths. Even worse, the hormones in the beef were giving the men large jugs. Was this the usurper’s plan? Did he have so much trouble winning on that he needed to grow some man-boobs on his subjects? Apparently not. In any case, the novelty would wear of rather quickly.

Clearly, I had to take action. The fate of the world was resting on my shoulders. I saddled up Roger and headed into town to ask for directions to California. I soon discovered a second obstacle: California was a long way from home. Just then I was told about a new technology that allowed me to reach people on the other side of the world. It was almost as good as a phone call, but you had to type out your message. Fortunately for me it was free and had the added advantage that I could tell the usurper how I really felt without the embarrassment of having my arms ripped off and getting smacked with the wet end. I connected myself to this interweb, but the usurper was nowhere to be seen. I looked for his underlings, but they were also in hiding. Luckily, his subjects were there in large numbers. They suggestions I petition the usurper for a removal of the kangaroo ban.

That is when the underlings started to appear. They told the subjects how bad factory farming was and suggested that they respond by continuing to eat factory farmed meat and refusing to eat free range kangaroo, in case some equally wicked person figured out how to torture kangaroos without getting disemboweled. I exposed this trick, but they had another up their sleeves. A violent terrorist called Peta* (*not her real name) who also liked to blow up cars started telling everyone that Kangaroos were nearly extinct, because there were less of them now than ten years ago before the big drought started. I dealt with this, only to encounter another, more sinister ploy. Peta’s followers started signing my petition, only to write obscenities all over it. When this didn’t work, even more signed the petition, then insisted that I remove their signatures because I had tricked them into signing it. To further complicate things, they left no way for me to verify which signatures were theirs. In a bizarre twist, they gave up trying to confuse the usurpers subjects and demanded the petition removed be removed. For some reason they succeeded, so I started a second petition calling for the reinstatement of the first petition. This second petition was also deleted, but only after the first petition magically re-appeared. I had experienced my first small success with these petitions and drawn lots of attention to the crisis, so I knew I was on to something.

On disconnecting myself from the interweb, I discovered that it was almost lunch time already. Little did I know that during my apparently short connection time, I had been stuck in a time warp. Roger had fallen in love with a beautiful mare. Luckily for him the mare was tied up to the same rail and could not escape his advances. I ducked across the road to stock up on ammo, just in case. On returning, Roger has finished falling in love with the mare, so I mounted him and rode him home.

Note, this has become a choose your own adventure story. What happens now is up to you. This is one of the endings:

A funny thing happened while I was on my way home. The usurper’s underlings finally admitted that I was right and they were idiots. Confronted with this confession, the usurper had no choice but to remove the ban on kangaroo imports. The people rejoiced, the manboobs shrivelled to A cups, the waistlines shrank, the heart attacks stopped, the tortured baby cows were set free, the earth cooled, the rains came, the creeks flowed, the vegetation grew back and we all got drunk and went roo shooting.