The Age Of Uncertainty

‘uncertainty …’ by Kasmil

The Age Of Information

23 January – The pastoral text of Fr Reuter is this: Nuclear weapons have heightened the widespread climate of uncertainty and fear. – Benedict XVI. We are in the Age of Information and yet we are also in the Age of Uncertainty. Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Those stories of atomic bombing happened more than 60 years ago, 6 and 9 August 1945. If you doubt that there is Hell, ask those who survived the bombing.

Nuclear weapons or not, it’s all a question of war, of belligerence, of solving problems by violence, of reacting with violence to an act of violence. And dreams of empire – The Philippines was attacked at the time when we were not (we have never been) belligerent toward any country. We have since grown older but about peace and war, we have not grown any wiser.

In Flickr, I saw two images both titled ‘Uncertainty’ – the other one was that of a monkey. I was thinking we are all monkey-brained thinking of war. That’s the adult way of looking at it. If you are reading this, you must be an adult; we adults have lost our innocence, and that explains why the image I have chosen is that of a child whose innocence is plain and simple. Unless you bring innocence to the question of war, you’ll never understand it, and you’ll never get away from its power to suck you either as the belligerent or the beleaguered. To me, there is no uncertainty in that.