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Thursday, September 30, 2004
War on terror; war on weather; war on want
War on terror.
Even its rhyming has become obscene. What benefit has it brought to
our planet? Every one knows that the war has just made our planet
unlivable. Lives of humans across the world probably including the US
has been made miserable and nobody has an exit plan. Even John Kerry
only says that regarding Iraq, there has to be a direction change .
Which way ? it is a 360 degree world we are living in ! Unless the
direction is inwards , nothing is going to change.
War on weather
It has become another fashionable term. It was just a week or two ago,
Kamran Abbasi, the acting editor (kabbasi@bmj.com)at BMJ was
commenting on war on weather . In an editor's choice article of that
issue, the writer was writing on climate change and health.He says "
Warnings and signs of our hastening doom have been largely ignored or
downplayed. Melting ice caps and rising seas are not immediately
noticeable. Floods in South Asia and drought in Africa are someone
else's problem. An Alaskan village on the edge of the Arctic Circle
and the islands of the Maldives are paradises soon to be lost. But
hurricane after hurricane ripping through Florida and devastating the
Caribbean is harder to ignore.( Even for BMJ, with a world wide non
medical reader ship, being an open access online journal, the
situation is alarming only when something happens on either side of
Atlantic! ). The rich world and the poor world are united in
vulnerability to nature. The war on weather is one that we are
hopelessly ill equipped to win; prevention is our only
salvation....... And then there are the health and economic
consequences of major floods and hurricanes.The earth's surface
temperature, which had dropped 0.2{degrees}C over a thousand years,
has jumped 0.4{degrees}C over the last hundred. The sea level is up 15
cm and the global concentration of atmospheric CO2 has risen by 25% in
a century of rapid technological advance but equally rapid
environmental destruction. These changes may already be irreversible.
What of the future?" .Let me take a break form the theme of Kamran
abbasi's article. He is obviously concerned with war on weather in his
pursuit on the associated health hazards. At this point I want to take
my readers to an unassuming website on war on want, which will tell
you the root evil which has to be addressed. That takes us to war on
want.
War on want
A letter from Victor Gollancz to The Guardian in February 1951 led to
the founding of War on Want. His letter asked people to join an
international struggle against poverty. Harold Wilson coined the name.
The result was the birth of a movement that has been at the forefront
of the fight against injustice ever since. Go to their website called
www.waronwant.org and see what they say. Just let me copy from what
they have to say about future. "Today 1.2 billion people live in
absolute poverty..... Despite this bleak picture globalisation has
brought many benefits. Some of the victories that War on Want and
others have been fighting for have been won: per capita food
production and consumption have increased by 20% and malnutrition
rates are down by almost a third since we were founded. But the
benefits of globalisation are not distributed equally, either within
or between countries...............War on Want like many others is
angry about the inequities and suffering that persist in the new
millennium and we are using the opportunities which globalisation
offers to take the struggle for economic and social justice in to a
new phase. The use of computers and the Internet allows us to keep in
contact with our partners overseas and organise together to ensure the
voices of the poor and powerless are heard.
So let us move on to war on want,rather than the farce wars which we
tend to fight, on terror and weather.
If you are still not impressed why a war on want has to be the real
human concern rather than war on terror or weather , just remember the
Pulitzer award winner photograph of 94.It was the photograph which
shocked the world- a famine stricken child crawling towards a UN
famine camp,a vulture watching close behind it, waiting for its prey
to die( It was from the famine in Sudan in 1994. Not from Dar fur
region of 2004. ( History has got a habit of repeating, isn't it ? )
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Thursday, October 07, 2004
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Saturday, October 30, 2004
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