Present and Future

by Guillermo Alvarado

It was undoubtedly with the best intentions in the world that the United Nations called for a World Summit on the Future, whose main objective was to guarantee that the new generations would have the opportunity to have a future.

After two world wars in the first half of the 20th century and numerous and painful armed conflicts, some of them with international participation, in the second half of that century, the first years of the third millennium are not exactly a guarantee for dreaming about tomorrow.

The first step in thinking about the future is for the UN itself to be capable of a major institutional transformation, so that it can become an effective mechanism for ensuring the peaceful coexistence of humanity, something that today is a utopia.

As the President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, said the day before in his speech to the Summit, the United Nations Organization was built for a world that no longer exists.

The Security Council and the obsolete veto of five powers no longer represent or function for what is now the international community.

As its name implies, this Council should guarantee that every human being has the certainty of waking up alive tomorrow, an indispensable condition for planning his or her future in the short, medium and long term.

What future do the children of Gaza have today when their homes, schools, recreation centers and even hospitals are being bombed by the Zionist state of Israel?

How can we think about the future when there is plenty of money for bombs, missiles, ultra-modern aircraft of astonishingly deadly precision, and other killing machines, but no money to mitigate the effects of climate change in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean? I still believe in the good intention of holding a Summit of the Future, but I am very pessimistic and rather sad about what can be built on the basis of what we have on the planet today.