Marian Wright Edelman Reflects on Working Toward Peace
We
are living in a time of unbearable dissonance between promise
and performance: between good politics and good policy;
between professed and practiced family values; between racial
creed and racial deed; between calls for community and rampant
individualism and greed; and between our capacity to prevent
and alleviate human deprivation and disease, and our political
and spiritual will to do so.
We are also living at an incredible moral moment in history.
Few human beings are blessed to anticipate or experience
the beginning of a new century and millennium. How will
we say thanks for the life, earth, nations, and children
God has entrusted to our care? What legacies, principles,
values, and deeds will we stand for and send to the future
through our children to their children and to a spiritually
confused, balkanized, and violent world desperately hungering
for moral leadership and community?
How will progress be measured over the next thousand years
if we survive them? By the kill power and number of weapons
of destruction we can produce and traffic at home and abroad?
Or by our willingness to shrink, indeed destroy, the prison
of violence constructed in the name of peace and security?
Will we be remembered in the last part of the twentieth
century by how many material things we can manufacture,
advertise, sell, and consume, or by our rediscovery of more
lasting, nonmaterial measures of success-a new Dow Jones
for the purpose and quality of life in our families, neighborhoods,
cities, national and world communities? By how rapidly technology
and corporate-mergermania can render human beings and human
work obsolete? Or by our search for a better balance between
corporate profits and corporate caring for children, families,
and communities? Will we be remembered by how much a few
at the top can get at the expense of many at the bottom
and in the middle, or by the struggle for a concept of enough
for all? Will we be remembered by the glitz, style, and
banality of too much of our culture in McLuhan's electronic
global village or by the substance of our efforts to rekindle
an ethic of caring, community, and justice in a world driven
too much by money, technology, and weaponry?
The answers lie in the values we stand for and in the
actions we take today. What an opportunity for good or evil
we personally and collectively hold in our hands as parents;
citizens; religious, community, and political leaders; and-for
those Americans among us-as titular world leader in this
post-Cold War and post-industrial era at the beginning of
the third millennium.
A thousand years ago the United States was not even a
dream. Copernicus and Galileo had not told us the earth
was round or revolved around the sun. Gutenberg's Bible
had not been printed. Wycliffe had not translated it into
English, and Martin Luther had not tacked his theses on
the church door. The Magna Carta did not exist; Chaucer's
and Shakespeare's tales had not been spun; and Bach's, Beethoven's,
and Mozart's miraculous music had not been created to inspire,
soothe, and heal our spirits. European serfs struggled in
bondage while many African and Asian empires flourished
in independence. Native Americans peopled America, free
of slavery's blight, and Hitler's holocaust had yet to show
the depths human evil can reach when good women and men
remain silent or indifferent.
A thousand years from now, will civilization remain and
human-kind survive? Will America's dream be alive, be remembered,
and be worth remembering? Will the United States be a blip
or a beacon in history? Can our founding principle "that
all men are created equal" and "are endowed by
their Creator with certain inalienable rights" withstand
the test of time, the tempests of politics, and become deed
and not just creed for every child? Is America's dream big
enough for every fifth child who is poor, and every eighth
child who is mentally or physically challenged? Is our world's
dream big enough for all of the children God has sent as
messengers of hope?
Can our children become the healing agents of our national
and world transformation and future spiritual and economic
salvation? Edmond McDonald wrote:
When God wants an important thing done in this world or
a wrong righted, He goes about it in a very singular way.
He doesn't release thunderbolts or stir up earthquakes.
God simply has a tiny baby born, perhaps of a very humble
home, perhaps of a very humble mother. And God puts the
idea or purpose into the mother's heart. And she puts it
in the baby's mind, and then-God waits. The great events
of this world are not battles and elections and earthquakes
and thunderbolts. The great events are babies, for each
child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged
with humanity but is still expecting good-will to become
incarnate in each human life.
And so God produced a Gorbachev and a Mandela and a Harriet
Tubman and an Eleanor Roosevelt and an Arias and each of
us to guide the earth toward peace rather than conflict.
I believe that protecting today's children-tomorrow's
Mandelas and Mother Teresas-is the moral and commonsense
litmus test of our humanity in a world where millions of
child lives are ravaged by the wars, neglect, abuse, and
racial, ethnic, religious, and class divisions of adults.
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