Make Everyday Pangea Day

This four-hour program of films, music, and speeches is going to air around the world in a few hours. But who are we kidding? It isn’t gonna change the world.
-Pepe Diokno

I first heard the term Pangea from my brilliant Nat Sci 2 professor. Pangea, she said, was, "About 250 million years ago, the entire world was a super-continent called Pangea. The giant land mass has since broken up, forming the Earth we see today." Yes. The continents was once one big land mass. Just imagine how chaotic the world would be if everyone can go to anywhere by bus.

Anyway, now, this term is used as fitting title to another "unifying effort" to save the world through music. Well. Really. Lots of efforts by musicians and different artists in the past years have done benefit concerts or for-a-causes, but years after do they make a change?

MTV's Live 8 concert for their campaign, Make Poverty History, in 2005, has admitted that this project-for-a-cause has not borne fruit. “If the G8 were high school seniors, they might be in for some summer school,” their report reads.

Don't get me wrong. I like it that people are doing their best to, uh, save whatever it is that needed to be saved. (Just a side note. Sir Marquez told us that the earth need not be saved because, through natural processes, it can save itself. The difference is that the earth, by itself takes longer.)

But as Neil Gallagher (in Pepe Diokno's article in Philstar's Supreme yesterday) — who was not a part of Live 8 — said, in a conversation with UK’s The Guardian in 2005, “Are they hoping that one of these guys from the G8 is on a quick 15-minute break at Gleneagles and sees Annie Lennox singing Sweet Dreams and thinks, ‘F*ck me, she might have a point there, you know?’… Keane doing Somewhere Only We Know and some Japanese businessman going: ‘Aw, look at him … we should really f*ckin’ drop that debt.’ It’s not going to happen, is it?”

We can't expect these big shots to do the change the world for us. Because let's face it, they're doing better off. So why would they bother. And as a cliche goes, Why fix it if it ain't broke. Such selfishness, but true.

In short, we have to act now if we really want change. Whether political, social, environmental. You name it. And as the organizers of Pangea Day agree. “Movies alone can’t change the world. But the people who watch them can."

John Mayer's song puts it best by saying, "Now we see everything that's going wrong with the world and those who lead it. We just feel like we don't have the means to rise above and beat it. So we keep waiting, waiting. Waiting on the world to change."

I should stop waiting, and act. But I should face the fact that some things are easier said, or typed, than done.



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The quotes used above are from the great Pepe Diokno's article yesterday, 10 May 2008, in PhilStar.