The day after

A TV movie in 1983, The Day After, was about a nuclear exchange between the United States and the then-Union of Socialist Soviet Republics before the latter disintegrated and the former started subtle-to-overt national bragging. What triggered the exchange in the movie was a quarrel between the two Germanys and a Soviet blockade of West Berlin. The film never pinpointed who started the nuclear holocaust but the movie was about the exchange.

The film focused on mid-America’s Kansas after a nuke attack and the radiation slowly devastated the survivors, ending in a fade out into black and silence after questions asked on radio went unanswered: “Hello? Is anybody there? Anybody at all?” Deafening silence prevailed.

The Day After Tomorrow was a climate fiction-disaster movie more than 20 years later (2004) when global cooling occurred after a global warming warning went unheeded in a United Nation’s conference in New Delhi, resulting in the freezing of the northern hemisphere. The U.S. President, in a slap to current sentiments then, asked constituents to escape the Ice Age by crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico, a sight that was incongruous at a time when “wetbacks” were vilified for crossing the border. A solid fence actually went up in Texas to keep the migrants from across the border out.

Meanwhile, search and rescue operations were conducted in a devastated frozen New York City. The human instinct for survival was tested. The movie ends with astronauts looking out of their space station on Earth, the northern hemisphere covered in ice and snow, and a voice blithely saying: “Look at that . . . Have you ever seen the air so clear?”

Disaster movies have always fascinated the modern mind, a common fare in the drive-in especially after the Pollyannaish “they lived happily ever after” of the giddy ’20s. But the silver lining of the “air so clear” image decades later might induce us to revisit the notion of “the day after” and create our image of what we want it to be rather than let it just be the result of an unexpected calamity jerked out of passion rather than intentional planning. In fact, the government of the Netherlands was just sued by its own citizens for alleged failure to stem climate change.

Not that we are not capable of destroying ourselves and the planet where we live but that conscious choice as an option is proposed by the Netherland suit where human rights prevail over acquiescence and resignation to an automatic slide into a blind alley of unleashed but unguided fate and destiny.

The figures on Earth’s health are verifiable. The population uses more than the planet’s holding capacity, our extractive policies of nature’s assets from mines that puts value on minerals more than on miners, to indiscriminate expelling of effluents into rivers, lakes, and seas beyond their natural absorptive abilities, on taking out farm hands by increasing insecticide, pesticide, and fertilizer use to ensure full production, all forcing us into stages of metabolic evolution not of our own conscious design.

Then there is the planet, not just a bundle of inert elements and materials for our use and misuse but a throbbing organism in its own right with human beings as integrally interdependent on its wellbeing, its devastation a destruction of umbilical cords tied to the green mantle.

It is time to paint a picture of the day after as a heroic human struggle not only on leveling access to resources and the means of production, but on a universal program to distribute benefits in goods and services; that the decision-making processes of the planet are not consigned and limited to the Carnegies, Morgans, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Harrimans and Schiffs, their allies in central banks and finance institutions that bankroll the operations of energy companies under the protection of the superpower of the planet, abetted by the extractive technologies now spread out throughout the laboring classes in countries around the world.

The conscienticized Pinoys in this readership recognize that if they do not belong to the 6,000 landed families in the home country, they do not count among the elite that yields power, presided over by corporations of interrelating global boards. They need to get in the act, regardless.

Yes, the day after must proceed from a quiet revolution of human deeds, out of self-interest, knowing that “ego and eco” are complementary poles. There are no authentic people save as there is a sustaining planet that maintains us.

The earthrise photo from the Apollo program (started in ‘66, ending in ‘72), and its 17th flight was the last human journey outside the low gravitational orbit of the Earth and the last human landing on the moon, until the Chinese cosmonauts make their scheduled trip shortly. The earthrise image fuels the imagination, not so much to egg us to outer space odysseys, as it is to start “playing” attention to our habitat, Mother Earth. Let’s play Earth, the day after!