By Smaktakula

Several news organizations, most notably Promethean Times, have long been skeptical of nature’s ostensibly beneficent disposition toward humanity.  The popular fiction of nature is that of a homeostatic system, designed to encourage and perpetuate terrestrial life.  As we have long suspected, events in Cambodia are proving the converse: Mother Nature is out to get you.

The trouble began when a group of 136 students at Kompong Cham High School abruptly lost consciousness.  Initial reports identified the mass fainting spell as the result of the students being forced to stand at attention by an overzealous school master for failing to properly salute the nation’s flag.  This analysis was revealed to be dangerously naive .

As it turns out, the real culprit was the abundance of huge trees surrounding the school.  Historically, the earth’s flora have absorbed carbon dioxide for millennia untold, all the while releasing life-giving oxygen into the atmosphere.  The natural order has changed, however, claims Heng Meng, police chief of the Chamkar Leu district and apparently the country’s leading environmental scientist, who says that the massive trees have now decided to hoard oxygen, resulting in the mass fainting.

In any other country, these life-stealing trees would undoubtedly be allowed to continue victimizing the young while politicians grandstanded for the television cameras and argued among themselves.  But Cambodia is a country historically predisposed to quick and furious action.  If the past is any indication, those plucky Cambodians will soon uproot the trees in the middle of the night and round them up in a central location, perhaps a sports stadium or municipal park, at which point the trees will be shot in the back and dumped in mass graves.