Our
Planet
My young days were spent at my Grandpa Christopher’s
farm. We would spend all summer there my brother Daniel and I while we had
school holidays.
There was always a lot to do from early morning till
late in the evenings. We would milk the cows, feed the chickens, and ride the
tractor while grandpa would till the land. In the afternoon, we would go
swimming in the little pond down in the forest and play cowboy and Indians in
the barn.
Being on the farm kept us close to nature with all sorts of flying
insects and crawling bugs and Grandpa used to always say, “learn to share your planet”.
Then we grew up and went to college and earned our
university degrees and joined the corporate world.
It was a rat race and we soon forgot all about nature
and were immersed in the daily routine of city life. No space for anyone in
this life, no animals, no pets and not even a fish aquarium.
We were so very
busy earning our living, fighting the corporate politics and traveling to and
from work that we had little time for anything else.
Our apartments were fumigated regularly as the kids
were afraid of bugs and the wives would raise merry hell. Parks were no longer
safe as muggers and drug addicts had taken over. There were no more zoos after
the last incident of some drug crazed maniac feeding substance to the animals
and killing half the population.
Weekends at the farms were a thing of the past as our
children had the least amount of interest and would rather spend time on their
computers and internet and hi fi gadgetry.
We truly were living a mechanical life almost as good
as robots.
We had no time for others and others had no time for
us. Life was one big highway to office and back and we forgot all issues like
kindness to animals, partying with friends, days out with the family and
get-together with relatives.
The corporations began to dump their waste into the
rivers and seas and soon with the chemicals and nuclear waste, a change was
being noticed.
Our bugs became more and more resistant to the insecticides and the
fumigation companies began to use more and more lethal chemicals. These too
ultimately reached the oceans and mutated our fish making them inedible.
The
food chain began to get affected, and soon our poultry and livestock supply
began to die. They became affected by the feed and there after we moved to
genetically grown animals and this created all sorts of other issues that
people stopped eating meat.
But as if that was the least of our problems, nature
has its funny ways and soon the oceans began to evaporate causing the harmful
particles to go into the atmosphere and upon condensation converted to acid
rain on our fields of agriculture contaminating our food supply. Man started
fighting for food and countries went to war for uncontaminated food stock from
the godowns built under the earth.
Then one day, the bugs came, swarms of locusts started
from the south and meticulously covered miles and miles of land as they moved
up the countryside devouring all in their way. Reproducing furiously, they grew
in size as the days went by and people had nowhere to hide. Soon the black ants
joined the wave along with carnivorous cockroaches and there was a dual land
and air attack and the globe was being run over.
All telecommunications were down, no army forces could
do anything, the bugs had eaten into all the wiring of the nuclear bombs and
eventually mankind had no chance.
The darkness is coming they said that morning, and soon
the skies turned black and there was this strange clicking sounds coming nearer
and nearer.
And as the darkness came upon us, I remembered
Christopher, my grandpa and his words, “learn to share your planet”.
- The
End -
