Man and his World

Title

Man and his World

Language

English

Source

The Cabletow Volume XXXIX (Issue No. 4) October 1963

Year

1963

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

MAN AND HIS WORLD By GAMALIEL R. BASILIO Editor-in-Chief of "The Lamb" Monthly organ of Salinas Lodge No. 1963 WHEN Rt. Wor. Bio. Charles S. * Mosebrook, Deputy Grand Mas ter, and his parly officially visited our District and remarked in an appropriate ceremony that "the world today has become so small" in the face of the tremendous pro gress produced and piled up by the scientific mind of man of this age, he was, to my way of thinking, an swering one of the biggCSt questions ever, “What has the world seen ol man today?” Let us start saying that with the abounding gift of nature, man pro fits as he did by the experiences of ancient failures and frustrations ol his past. In a manner of speech, man, because of his searching mind and strong fortitude was able to re build in a truly manly fashion his dignity that onto has virtually top pled down with the great crash of the glory that was (fleece’s and the decline of the grandeur that was Rome’s. He rose upon the ruins of an old culture and civilization, yes, tre mendously so until suddenly again lie nefariously forced himself into the original and pristine dilemma which, for its sordid effects, he could have otherwise rationally avoided. Quite consciously, he accorded his lessons a distorted appreciation; he almost hardly reserved power enough to think and sustain his belief that the world about him constantly needed of his person and his generation a rather vigorous espousal of and tena cious adherence to moral reforms and soc ial order calculated to radiate precise glory to the Great Architect of the Universe. With due respect and high esteem towards responsible men who serve humanity through SPECIALIZED fields of science, I beg to say that the noticeable strides of the savants’ scintillating mind, oddly enough, have in a significant measure laid before this postdiluvian generation a problem which most of us arc congenetally, I presume, unable to com prehend much less fully understand and advance or put forward wise solutions to. This is authority to say that man deliberately moves in his little world in so fast and pro gressive a pattern: his paces show his direction and seem to be telling how definitely consigned lie is to conquering the physical world. In fact, man has gone far enough, and i> set going farther on, God lot bid, introducing manifold changes of ex ternal conditions which even his in ner self cannot seem to catch up with. The Prime Minister of India observed that after man has allowed history to record his brilliant and daring conquests he has "failed to conquer himself". 122 The Cabletow l'or one tiling, while man had con vinced the world (hat he is exceed ingly powerful with what he earned in his startling defiance of the law of gravity as shown by his successful experiments with the intricacies in volved in the process when he started orbiting the earth with his Russian sputnik and thereat ter rocketing in to the world of weightlessness his American version of atomic space crafts with supersonic speed, none the less, he now stands out before the bar of public opinion unrcleased from the sheer feeling of gigantic inadequacy as his creation of the idea of “colossalism’’ is squarely chal lenged. His breakthrough in space exploration and his impressive pos session and demonstrated control ol impregnable-looking ground and na tal forces are very remarkable; it has catapulted him considerably to that variable throne of greatness. But, somehow, he has to face the fact that it is at this same point where his wisdom, nay, his so called GREATNESS — winces. Lest we for get, with t|tc almost inconsequential volume of the human brain as com pared to the size <>1 the world man lives in. it becomes almost impos sible to believe that, factors consid ered, he — this man — h;is let loose a deafening description of his po tentiality to destroy by ‘burning the whole world” in a matter ol minutes at any given time. At the moment, to give1 this subject an ex panded treatment here would be to indulge in elephantine pursuits. Sullicc it to say that the world has witnessed the niacl motion ol this man; by the latter’s tongue and pen the lornier has suffered and it seems it is bound to suffer some more, and more indeed if man -, ac tivity will have to drift unsuspect ingly from God’s will and Divine in tentions. Things being what they appear to be, we know that before nations joined the U.S. and Bri tain “in subscribing to the prohibi tion against nuclear weapons tests’’, man annoyed, and therefore has men aced, the peace of mankind when his Russian prejudices and tempera ments influc ne ed him to want to con tinue holding nuclear underwater, space, and atmospheric tests in spite of .America’s INITIAL approach and sane proposal of banning the: prac tice. We know, loo, that for delib erate reasons of defense or otherwise, nations of man across the seas and in places se parated from us by vast land surfaces arc meaningfully in solved in mass production ol atomic weapons lor mass destruction. Pa renthetically. the Hydrogen Bomb or its kind is recognized as having in a qualified sense the capacity of annihilating the human race. But cer tainly, the existence of man’s ingennuity in his being able to contrive this and oilier deadly tools of war fare does n<>t. and we must add. can not totally wipe out the living fact that he too alone can possibly re cognize the international value ol tile Big 'Fable around which great men of great nations confer and teach frqm time io time an agreement that can resohc once and for all the logic ol violence in relation to man’s lervcni desiic to attain his peace. Man, th. n, can hope- to survive in peace depending on whic h side of the great dividing line he happened to fence hiinscll in. Al this point he should lie able to adequately iden tify hintsc 11: — Of course, neither must he do it by the color of his skin nor by the language he speaks. •October 1963 123 Not by the country of his origin, either. Be that as it may, a singular course of action kit for us to follow becomes apparent: we size him neces sarily by which one of the two dif ferent world ideologies he believes in and lives truly by. In this con nection, if only to say that one sys tem is better than the other, let us tell him that if he still is within the tamp of “non-conformists”, to coin the term, or that he is not yet a free man in the democratic sense of the word, let us rally him up to join the vest of the free people of the world in their crusade for a well meaning life; let us tell him that under our Free System a band of competent men of peace arc dead-serious diplo matically running the international affairs of free states without the least violating the sovereignty of the lat ter. Too, let's make him firmly realize our well-founded courage to say that the Free World’s massive stock of arms in strategic armories deployed throughout the world is not without influence on the minds of the communists. And when he needs elaboration on this, hasten to men tion generously the constructively revealed striking power of America and her allies which made Khrush chev-Russia reconsider things as this situation was vividly shown in all its clarity during the wake of the erstwhile light Cuban crisis that ul timately saw the dedared withdrawal of and “significant reduction in So viet forces...” that poured for one reason or another into that West In dies island. Obviously, this world incident has essentially kept the United States invested with the dis tinct international dignity despite the non-use of her maneuverable power into actual military struggle at that given eventuality. But let us believe that on the other side of the coin Russia did not lose. His tact in eventually consenting to the consistent universal demand that he desists from attempting to ignite a global conflict (which he cotdd have done by insisting to go on with his military build-up in Cuba) has earned for him a soft spot in the hearts of freedom-loving peoples of the world. Evidently, therefore, if man has to go his own way to such an extent dial he critically miscalculates and stubbornly ignores the tenable merits of pliant issues vitally connected with his present anti the future peace of his sensitive generalion simply be cause of his chronic consciousness ol wliai a mighty stock of nuclear de vices available at his command can pliysically do lor him, then he is liable to encounter a still more ter rific event that would not in itself present an opportunity for him t<» find a purposeful and rewarding so lution to that sought-after degree of peace. Truer then has become of the pronounced statement that man and himself alone spells his own destiny still. Significantly, man who is said time and again to be the KEEPER OF HIS BRO THER must now wake up to realities of the time. And warily he must. For in his twentieth cen tury slumber the question of his age has unequivocally emerged soonet than he thought: “Shall man turn against man to destroy man?” Cer tainly, not. Absolutely, no; it should not happen! Man, instead, must live and “without conditions” help others live. 124 The Cabletow

Media