The marches and comments from Strike Friday’s worldwide celebrations remind us that we all share a tender, vulnerable and unstable planet. Each of us must accept responsibility for its care. I share with you a quote from Peggy Pond Church’s book, “The House At Otowi Bridge.”
Niels Bohr was one of the atomic scientists who worked at Los Alamos during World War II. In a letter to the United Nations in 1950, he issued this warning, which was set aside by the United Nations believing “the statesmen of the world were not yet ready to learn new ways of dealing with one another.”
Perhaps we are ready, today, to listen to his plea.
“An open world where each nation can assert itself solely to the extent to which it can contribute to the common culture and is able to help others with experience and resources must be the goal to be put before everything else. … The development of technology has now reached a state where the facilities for communication have provided the means for making all mankind a cooperating unity … at the same time fatal consequences to civilization may ensue unless international divergences are considered as issues to be settled by consultation based on free access to all relevant information.”
Perhaps this is the challenge of today.
Dorothea Farris
Crystal Valley