Thrown Away

Waves crash against the shore with a sense of revenge, and waters turn with the power of an unseen force only influenced by a nearby gravity. Twenty leagues below this water, an adolescent whale silently begs for a chance at life. The only protector and provider it's ever had was slaughtered before it's own eyes, only to be a piece on a wall.

She's just three years old, and amazingly the female has been born without mutations. If she had her mother with her, we wouldn't have to watch her lonely ascent to the waters surface. Her confusion when a clear area was now thickly coated by fifteen feet of plastic. Unable to breathe due to the thick cover of debris, her thrashing eventually stops, and the last known female blue whale sinks to the very bottom of the sea, never to be seen again.

For years, birds thrived off of the dead fish. The easy prey allowed them to multiply, and without an outside force to kill them, thousands swarmed. Eventually, the fish became less and less, unable to replenish the amount of themselves being killed in non-oxygenated water. With less prey, birds began to starve. By the millions, they began to die. Before it had been at the hands of straws, bottle caps, plastic rings around cokes, and even golf balls, but this was the beginning of an epidemic of starvation. The birds who didn't perish flew inland for a chance at survival alongside humanity, leaving behind an empty sky.

Oil coats the Great Barrier Reef. Underwater forests, mountains, and its previous beauty are covered in black and impossible to see. Tar loiters around in black masses. Had the oil not killed all the life inside of the Reef, the cover of plastic and influx of algae would have sucked away all the oxygen. The ocean has become a vile green monster when you look below the surface.

Once under the tide, nothing moves. All is silent. A place once jubilant with the movement of life, a place previously beautiful, is now a place no human dares set foot into due to the toxic dangers ready to kill given the slightest step. Vacations are no longer trips to the beach, and touching water is a death sentence to even the bravest person.

Having wasted the oceans, humanity has wasted its biggest chance at survival. Every single animal inside the ocean is dead, and they will soon follow suite.

The ones who now starve in the huge ghettos, the young and old begging for food, the rich, the poor, every single person left in the world silently asks themselves the same question, and so would every single person from the past and future.

Why did I look away when the future needed me the most?

Why didn't I make a difference?