WORLD WAR

(From "A Weekend Note," the editor's letter in Style Weekend, Manila Bulletin's weekender, Friday, October 19, 2007)

Our quest for victory has, indeed, shaped the world as we know it now, where practically everything, as many will argue, is a result of our desire to win over nature. Thanks to this appetite for triumph, no matter what the odds, we have, to cite a few examples, heavy machinery coasting the airwaves in defiance of gravity and traveling through space to challenge the lack of it.

No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out. —Al Gore

In my book, it’s not so much about victory, but a passion to turn what seems implausible into common realities to make life better, longer, easier, more meaningful. Diseases, for instance, are part of nature and thankfully we have won many a battle on this front, except that, to this day, there is reason to believe that some of us are using this conquest over germ territory to craft biological weapons targeted against the rest of us.
Here, indeed, the winners become losers in the ultimate game that is life. The winning nations, otherwise known as the First World and most often represented by the United States of America, have always been accused of stacking the odds in their favor and leaving their poorer cousins, the Third World, with which the Philippines remains identified, to scamper around for the crumbs and, like puppets on a string, to subject themselves to the machinations of the nations in power. A recent report by the American Council for the United Nations University in Tokyo states that “although great human tragedies like Iraq and Darfur dominate the news, the vast majority of the world is living in peace.” But shortly after the release of this report, monstrosity broke out in Myanmar, where monks, symbols of the peace-loving life, were the casualties. Suddenly, I am proud that, at least in Philippine history, thanks to the Edsa Revolution in 1986, peace, as symbolized by the nuns and the priests who trooped to the streets to call for change, prevailed upon brute force. Even the most heartless of gunmen could not have possibly fired at the lady in white with a rosary in her hands.
A new war is upon us now and it does not involve goons or terrorists or dictators or insatiable superpowers. This year, Al Gore’s extreme efforts to call attention to global warming have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, which he now shares “in equal parts,” as the Norwegian Nobel Committee points out, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s sad that this distinction is an admission that “Yeah, Gore was right,” now that climate change has melted ice over a section of the North Pole the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.
Suddenly, all the other threats to world peace, Myanmar, North Korea, Darfur, Iraq, and Turkey joining in the fray, seem so inconsequential, although, according to a Time report, the opening up of all that once impassable space in the Arctic, which provides the shortest route between the Atlantic and the Pacific, is again causing a commotion in the form of territorial pissings among Canada, Norway, Russia, and, again, the United States.
But yes, Gore is right and, whether we like it or not, what’s happening—melting ice, diminishing forests, species loss, weather disturbances—is leading us all in the direction of a war to end all wars and possibly everything else, including life itself.
With hope, Gore is right, indeed, in his belief that all is not hopeless and that, yes, win this war we can, except that this war is different because in this war the enemy is ourselves.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com