SUZANNE MILLS Friday, July 20 2012

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Village patrol: Armed police officers patrol the Athletes' Village at the Olympic Park, yesterday in London. The 2012 Olympic Games begins next Friday...

ON Sunday I went down to the water because it had called, but on reaching the shore I was aghast, appalled, not enthralled.

Plastic floated here, cigarette filter sitting there, but few signs of life other than us humans: we were the filthiest animals of them all. Poor Pisces, how me must shudder in his bed of salt.

The sea beckoned yet I reckoned it might be damned for all time, that soon we would have left this earth and us high and dry. How could we turn back the clock, undo our manly crime? The sea was not our laundry; we could not cleanse its water by beating it on a rock.

As I waded and wandered, I pondered the chances of catching disease instead of fish-the first was a given; the second a dumb woman’s wish. Was this why man and woman had been given a mind? So we could destroy Mother Earth and our own kind? Offshore, inshore we drilled and spilled, as we drained the earth of its core and pocked its surface with sore after sore.

Mankind now thought of himself as God and God was man to us. We had created vampires a la mode, as if we possessed the genetic code to create life and death. We extracted cells from the dead and unborn to make them undead, not give them life. We were creating bloodsuckers and Frankensteins. We called it biology when it was really bionics: millions of million-dollar men and women was seen as life’s tonic. We could not longer suffer pain, embrace death, accept our fates. We had tablets and surgery, transplants and trans-cells, determined as we were to prolong our physical stay on a planet which exhausted and beaten and perforated could not longer mankind sustain. Fate had been replaced by faith in our human superiority, as we sought our own eternity, to reach infinity.

Womankind was no saint — she too who could not by natural means give birth refused to come to terms with her lot on this Earth and made babies in test tubes and in vitro; she even froze her eggs. This was not female liberartion; it was our doom; the next generation would lay the blame for their poverty and hunger at the doorsteps of their forefathers and foremothers. Who could blame them for pointing fingers toward the past; it was their sorry lot that we had cast, dying as they were before they could be born, their future, their dawn killed by their ancestors’ pride, false as it was.

They would have to fight over the Earth’s crumbling crumbs, over a dry and cracked, plant and animal-less plant was our will to them; it was their inheritance. We had made too many decisions which were not ours to make. Had we let life run its course, we would have understood that infinity and eternity are an eight and eight is re-incarnation; we should know how to respect fate, let nature take our bodies when it willed, and yes some of us might have been early o lock killed. But so what; in sacrifice lay the survival of the species.

But we man and woman had set us against and above the rest of the world and now our greed and egocentricity would provide the ultimate test of our mettle. We so vain; we thought we had all the answers because we had been given a conscious brain, which we were using to flush us all down the drain. The world that was left when we killed us would keep on turning, even as we turned in our self made graves.

We were sucking the Earth’s marrow as if there were no tomorrow. Only when we gasped our last breath or sipped our last sip, would we understand and believe in FATE, but by then it would be too late.

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