Dorsal fins cutting through the water
where all the minnows go –
if I were you I’d run for shore
instead of watching dinner and a show.
Instead you flop and flounder
indistinct against the water –
concerned with treading in place
while things are getting so much hotter.
It’s a shame for all them fish,
the ones that got caught far too soon –
they looked so playfully fun once,
now they’re bathed in blood beneath the moon.
To Ink - a blog from Melting Neurons 
A thoughtful poem.
Although I’m awed by beautiful oceans’ blue and green — and especially the life within — I’m also left more concerned about the increasing plastic entanglement mess hazardously dumped into them.
How does humankind correct its collective addiction to disposability when — regardless of scuba divers’ reports of immense tangled plastic messes (not to mention plastic bags found at some of the ocean’s deepest points) — so much of it is not immediately observable, i.e. out of sight, out of mind, thus misperceived as no threat to us?
It doesn’t surprise me, as general human mentality collectively allows us to, amongst other forms of blatant pollution, throw non-biodegradables down a dark chute like we’re safely dispensing it into a black-hole singularity to be crushed into nothing.
And then there’s the astonishing short-sighted entitled selfishness. I observed this not long ago when a Vancouver TV news reporter randomly asked a young urbanite wearing sunglasses what he thought of government restrictions on disposable plastic straws. “It’s like we’re living in a nanny state, always telling me what I can’t do,” he recklessly retorted.
Astonished by his shortsighted little-boy selfishness, I wondered whether he’d be the same sort of individual who’d likely have a sufficiently grand sense of entitlement — i.e. ‘Like, don’t tell me what I can’t waste or do, dude!’ — to permit himself to now, say, deliberately dump a whole box of unused straws into the Georgia Strait, just to stick it to the authorities who’d dare tell him that enough is enough with our gratuitous massive dumps of plastics (the strait, of course, being defenseless against such guys who’d assert such self-granted sovereignty).
This could be his way of giving the figurative middle-finger at any new government rules. ‘There! How d’ya like that, pal!’
His careless mentality still makes me very angry.
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Interesting take, and I agree on the reckless mentality with which we are degrading the quality of the Earth’s resources. I had a conversation with my biology professor recently about the prospect of pseudo-sentience existing on the global scale with Gaia and his viewpoints on whether that (which would make us in many ways non-symbiotic parasites and a microorganism on a grander scale) was a reasonable belief system. Fascinating responses back suggest that because it’s a teleological argument that no one has figured out how to test scientifically there’s not much backing for it. I would think at some point the world will fight back willfully by formation of anti-bodies (viruses/pandemics/raising water levels) and eventually decimate the human population in an effort to stop and then regrow the madness of what we’ve wrought…but that’s just a personal opinion.
Thank you for stopping by and taking the time to read and respond.
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The concept of the planet finally forming anti-bodies to protect itself from the human blight reminds me of a term I heard a late-night radio talk-show host discuss about three decades ago — ‘The Quickening’.
But he may have just been watching too much of the TV series Highlander.
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Hahaha, always possible I suppose. Haven’t seen either so I’m in the dark on the reference but I appreciate you swinging back through to respond. Cheers!
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