Marching out of March madness

What is traditionally March madness in temperate Europe and western Asia is the gay proliferation of hares in the countryside. The hare, a cousin to the rabbit but with larger ears and longer legs, is nocturnal in habits save in the spring when it frolics above ground, chasing another to mate and bringing off its offspring on the ground rather than in burrows, inspiring the English idiom of “mad as a March hare.”
Outside my tenement apartment in Daoyi, Shenbei in Shenyang, China, is a “broken-down” children’s playground with a couple of the residents’ cars and/or vans regularly parked in the play area. Leavings from construction, maintenance and repairs, and the regular home trash are dumped around the electrical posts with the ubiquitous plastered signs that everyone seems to tolerate. With my penchant to carry a scraper and stop by unsightly plastered ads along the way, even with the sore right shoulder reminding me that, perhaps, I’ve been doing too much of it of late, I am in my elements.

Well, the knees insist on keeping the second long johns on, but what had been a long November to March of cold weather, the sun suddenly came out, and in a couple of days, the cherry blossoms in the playground popped open. The local government bulldozer and truck came around to scrape the trash, and voila, my neighbors’ gait had the sprite of the European hare!

March madness in America is often NCAA basketball’s end, and though we are now down to the elite eight, we will be into April before we hit the Final Four. The madness of the two main events in the global scene this month—the Russians in Crimea and the mystery of MH370—dominated consciousness and frayed nerves. A third sudden bloomer is China’s Xi Jin Ping’s measured strides into EU, grandiosely avoiding taking sides in the Russia-EU/USA “legal” conflict played out in the UN General Assembly.

The disintegration of the old Ukraine revealed the deep hypocrisy of the EU-USA axis and the foxy smarts of Putin, albeit with just a dab too much touch of arrogance. However, to watch President Obama mouth defensive pronouncements under the cloak of legality and constitutionality, and catching Hillary off-guard characterizing Putin as a Hitler, indicated that their buttons had been pushed. From my view, in principle, Russia is off the traditionally acceptable path, but in practicality, it is dead on center!

Russia west of the Urals is Europe. Belarus and Ukraine south were central to the Kievan Rus, and the Russian Empire. Transcaucasus joined in the formation of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics whose center could not hold in 1991 with the rise of nationalist ethos in response to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. With the last legally elected President of Ukraine suggesting a referendum of regions in Ukraine rather than a hasty presidential election to hold a Kiev-dominated nation is more realistic than a refuge to the nebulous claim to constitutionality. It is not too far fetched to transpose the Ukrainian situation to the continuing disintegration of the Thai constitutional monarchy.

However one looks at the situation, the Ukrainian and Thai situations, among many post-WWII neo-colonial geographical configurations, are simply the planets’ people adjusting to reality.

The sad fate of MH370 is another of the fine madness this March that is revealing a realistic truth. First, the practicality of a need defined the unconditional cooperation of 26 nations in a common effort. Logistics defined collaboration rather than the niceties of law and ideology.

Second, we discovered an alarming truth. With all the sightings of debris across a wide swath of the planet’s ocean, it confirmed what we already know in the Pacific. The earth’s fluid surface is one body of plastic soup! We are not just talking of small stuff. Huge bodies of waste, perhaps consigned for the incinerator, had been conveniently committed to the unnoticeable currents of winds and waves.

Third, emotions trumped insidious calculations on the cost of the bottom line. The hasty announcement by Malaysia’s PM that MH370 crashed into the Indian Ocean without a shred of evidence placed a questionable end to the agony of the waiting families of passengers in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, supported by the state’s airlines. KL’s spokesperson had to diplomatically repair the announced stance by affirming the state’s commitment to locate any survivors for as long as necessary.

China President Xi Jing Ping’s European tour is garnering attention as the head of the second largest world economy, regarded widely in Napoleonic terms as a “sleeping lion” best left undisturbed, rehearsed the Chinese dream as one of peace. (I wrote of China dreaming a year ago; I will reprise the theme in April.)

Madness is often a useful reality check at the personal level. Schizophrenia is often just a trip outside of one’s self so that one can return the wiser. The world experienced a communal one this month. We have the option to be wiser.

Jaime Vergara previously taught at SVES in the CNMI. A peripatetic pedagogue, he last taught in China but makes Honolulu, Shenyang, and Saipan home. He can be reached at pinoypanda2031@aol.com.