Tectonic Shifts

Monday, 28 March 2011 01:34

Written by Neric Acosta

The events of the last few weeks have been nothing short of cataclysmic.  A cataclysm is any violent upheaval, largely of the natural sort, and comes from the old Greek, kataklusmos, or the great deluge.  The word also derives from a reference to a biblical flood in the book of Genesis.

The hundred-feet walls of water that rampaged upon coastal towns and farms in northeastern Japan, sweeping everything on its calamitous path and transforming swaths of productive land into stretches of wasteland, showed the world more than a glimpse of that kataklusmos.  And when the nuclear complex of Fukushima Daichi exploded and the Japanese government frantically worked to avert a meltdown, the images became even more deadly -- in the literal radioactive sense of the word.

The cataclysm, of course, began with the shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates that gave rise to a magnitude 9 earthquake on March 11 this year.  Japan, as with the other countries that ring the Pacific, sits atop these plates.  Like gigantic jigsaw puzzle pieces, these geological foundations have rubbed and ground against each other for millennia, forming the “Ring of Fire” that makes numerous volcanoes active from Indonesia to Japan, from Alaska to Chile.  Temblors of varying intensities cause extensive damage to infrastructure and the displacement or death of hundreds or thousands of people.

That is why geologists now say that after the massive damage of the earthquakes that have struck Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, China and Japan in just the last five years, it is likely that the northeastern side of the Pacific Ring of Fire, California or the west coast of the United States, could well be next.  California rests of the perilous San Andreas Fault, on the very edge of the tectonic plate that runs astride the continental plate of North America.  If a killer quake like that which hit Japan of late occurs in California, whole cities from San Francisco to Los Angeles could well be swallowed up by the apocalyptic geological occurrence.

This certainly leaves us all feeling small, fragile and extremely vulnerable.  We are minute, infinitesimal specks in the universe, and when nature decides to heave and huff, we are simply at the mercy of its awesome powers.  A writer once said that, all told, we are human beings inhabiting the planet’s surface on account of geology’s consent – which can be withdrawn anytime.  We live not only on borrowed time, but also, if Japan’s devastating experience is anything to go by, on borrowed terrestial, geological space.

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Speaking of tectonic shifts, of the kind that reorders the body politic and ushers in revolutionary change in society, the other side of the world is also having its major share of kataklusmos.  The democratic temblors, so to speak, began in North Africa with the self-immolating sacrifice of an ordinary fruit vendor, Mohammad Boazizi of Tunisia.  Boazizi protested government’s indifference and repression in the face of his pleas for fair treatment by setting himself on fire, which set in dramatic, unstoppable motion a whole movement for freedom and democracy.  In a matter of a few weeks, Boazizi’s death was avenged by an empowered Tunisian citizenry demanding their political rights and democratic spaces.  Not knowing what hit him, the long-staying and isolated dictator Ben Ali was overthrown by an ascendant people power.

Like geological plates that start a destabilizing momentum in the earth’s crust, democratization in North Africa and the Middle East has reshaped the political landscape and put on eviction notice several overstaying, unaccountable autocracies all over the region.  This may have made this oil-rich chunk of the globe more volatile and vulnerable to extremism of different ideological or religious shades, but the trajectories of incontrovertible social change are now clearly set.

Hosni Mubarak’s subsequent downfall in Egypt and the protracted murderous mayhem in Moamar Gadhafi’s Libya have only shown the world that the tectonic shifts for greater democracy are as irreversible as they are earth-shaking and historic.  The latter point is made more acute or manifest by the fact that United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 has given rise to Western powers and members of the international community imposing a no-fly zone in Libya and launching air strikes and missile attacks to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Libya -- and stop Gadhafi from killing his own people who have chosen to chart their own future freed from the autocrat’s repressive rule of forty years.

While Western economies have high geopolitical and oil-dependent economic stakes in the region, the democratic humanitarian imperative is coming to greater fruition in that part of the world.  From Yemen to Syria, from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, the increasing magnitude of youth-led, anti-corruption-driven, and democracy-demanding protests signals a reconfiguring of the world order. The message is unmistakable: governments shaped in freedom and the democratic crucible exist only on account of a people’s consent, which can be withdrawn as they see fit. Leaders, in this respect, live on power essentially borrowed from the people.  This is the kind of global tectonic, cataclysmic shift we can all feel positive and hopeful about.

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