Utopia

~March 2089

An ideal world is something we all desire and wonder if it really is attainable and as I sit in my wheelchair, smiling at my great-granddaughter Michelle, I realize how lucky I am. Today, just like always, my relatives have decided to surprise me and I am sincerely surprised as Chance my grandson carries a chocolate cake and keeps it in the centre of the room

'Happy birthday granny' the rest of the gang shout, springing out from all their hiding places.

'Grandma, why are you crying?' Bess asks

'Baby, I'm just so happy'.

As the children continue their idle chatter, I cannot help but reminisce about the years gone past. If anyone had told me forty years ago that I would live to be ninety, I would have doubted it.

Life hadn't always been fair to me and I honestly don't know how on earth I survived. Although the scientists had predicted that by 2050, the plastic in the ocean will be more than fish (in weight) and had even started making plans to stop it, nobody on earth was prepared for the great plague of 2030. I was only thirty-one then but the plague took more than thirty-one things from me.

By the time the plague had ended in 2033, the world had lost more than half of her population. My husband and three of my children were no more and that was just in my immediate family. I lost uncles, nieces, siblings and my dear mother. I and my father were left with the task of arranging the family. Times were hard. The UN did a great job and National Geographic really helped lives. 

The plague made all of us become more conscious of what we had allowed to happen to our world. The United Nations worked hard to provide relief but it couldn't get everywhere. Economies crumbled and there was a great depression. Today, we are all conscious of our world. We still use plastic but they are recycled and are made from natural polymers. When the war ended, we experimented with a whole lot of things like iron, wood, glass among others.

Once every three months, we hold meetings on how to better our world. It hasn't been easy, but we've gotten here after fighting the plague caused by plastic (although we don't know exactly what happened), fighting deforestation immediately after the plague because forests and trees everywhere became threatened by people scared of plastic, curbing the excessive production of glass which skyrocketed and was almost as bad as plastic.They banned a lot of plastic production and increased the cost of production, making it very expensive to manufacture and by extension buy. While there are still plastic in my world today, the world is actually better because good people had to put a stop to pollution.

When I talk of Utopia, I realize that what I really want to say is peace at last.