When you hear the word war, what ideas come to you mind? Take a look at the following selection how war is seen. This could be made as an oratorical speech.
War As A New Approach To The Problems Of Contemporary Society - by Abraham I. Felipe
A state of war should be declared against poverty, against pollution and population, against the wasteful extraction and use of our country's land and water resources, and against the social inequity among our people. War is the only comprehensive tool known to man for systematically destroying enemies. To wage war is to say that we will apply the strategies of warfare in order to annihilate our opponents.
Such a plan of action for meeting the problems of our society carries several implications. One, the initiative for such an attack must be the state's. The resources needed to effectively launch it can only be harnessed through the use of the broad powers of the state. Undirected individual efforts such as one-man crusades of priests and ministers may only be wasted unless these are coordinated with much larger efforts. Even sectoral battles will have only feeble effects.
The efforts to increase rice production, the attempts to increase the exportation of certain products, the adoption of a means to select those who will go to college, or the imposition of stricter regulations aimed at compelling schools to improve instruction are sectoral efforts which contribute, though feebly, and in varying degrees of perceptibilty, to the campaign.
Another implication of waging war is that we must first identify the enemies. The identification will require more than saying our enemies are poverty, inequity, and a wasteful and inhospitable environment. We must be able to recognize the enemies in their many forms.
If we are fighting poverty, we must be able to say where poverty is found and how extensive an enemy force poverty really is. We must be able to estimate how much of that enemy appears in the form of inadequate food, inadequate clothing, inadequate medicine, irrelevant and insufficient education, wrong values, and subhuman housing. We must be able to recognize it even by its mere shadows such as in estimates of unemployment and underemployment.
Another implication of waging war is that we mush harness all our resources to launch it effectively.
A combat force may be the educational forces, consisting of all the schools, teachers, and students. Another may be the forces of industry and commerce which like the other forces are capable of being broken down into smaller units such as the agricultural army, within which is the rice production division within which in turn is the warehousing and milling battalion. Still another is the religious force which is necessary as we are interested in developing the total fullness of man. Our manpower resources must be fully arrayed, and their areas of responsibilities and lines of authority drawn.
The forces to be used in fighting this war, it should be noted, come from sectors which heretofore have been outside the direct control of government. A large part of the educational sector, almost all of the sectors of production and commerce, and the whole of the religious sector are private. There might, therefore, be some difficulty in enlisting them in the campaign since our society has deep respect for private initiative and individual freedoms. For this reason the declaration of a state of war is basic and necessary: it will enable the state to obligate those who are in the private sector to serve.
We look around us and we notice that right this very moment, battles are being fought. Do you notice what streets are being cleaned and widened, tourists being attracted to come over to our beautiful islands, farmers being given land and capital to increase their harvests, schools being urged to improve, and so on? These are skirmishes, isolated and of modest scale, nevertheless signalling that enemy forces are being engaged. But is there a battle plan for the total war to be waged systematically?
We are coming to the stage when a declaration of war against poverty of the body, intellect and spirit, against inequity in life's gains and opportunities, against the depletion of nature's wealth, against the pollution of our environment, and against the uncontrolled rise in population will be compelling, not because we owe it to ourselves but because we have to fulfill our duty to posterity.
Then the nation leadership will call us to arms. Before that comes to pass, I leave to you the choice, should we wait for that call to come, or should we hasten its coming? And when our war is declared, will we prefer to fight our individual life's battles, or will we join the collective campaign?