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January/February 2001
Caring
Enough to Build a World of Peace
But something, as we all know here today, is missing from these stunning achievements. UNICEF reports that more babies are being born into poverty than ever before. Never in history have we seen such numbers. Over 840 million of our brothers and sisters in the world are malnourished, including 160 million children, who still die at a rate of 40,000 a day. Just three of America's richest people have wealth that totals $155 billion, equivalent to the GNP of the thirty-two least economically developed countries in the world, containing over 800 million people. The top five percent of American families have more income than the bottom forty percent, which is over twenty-eight million families. How can our boastfully wealthy nation, which leads the world in gross domestic product and the number of millionaires and billionaires, look itself in the mirror each morning when one in five-or 13.5 million-children are still poor? Almost six million are living in extreme poverty, hunger increasing, homelessness there. How can we look ourselves in the face? What does keep us from doing what is right and decent in the wealthiest nation on earth? Just as our twentieth-century increase in wealth has not brought enough hope and bread to the majority of our world's neighbors, it has not brought a steady peace. Our twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history, with over 100 million civilians losing their lives in wars-which still rage in more than a dozen nations in the world right now. And in these, civilian deaths (the majority, women and children) have been four times the number of military war dead. Two million children were killed in armed conflict between 1986 and 1997, 4.5 million disabled, twelve million left homeless, over a million separated from their parents, according to UNICEF. What kind of world does this to its children? And here in America since Dr. King and Robert Kennedy died, we have lost over 1.4 million Americans. They have committed suicide or killed each other or engaged in violence, with guns and without guns. This is more American civilian deaths than the battle casualties we lost in all the wars of the twentieth century. What is so missing in our civic and spiritual life that this kind of culture of death has been so pervasive? And most shamefully, since 1979 we have lost over 80,000 American children to gunfire. That's 20,000 more children dead due to guns than we lost in battle casualties in the Vietnam war. What has happened to us that the killing of children by guns has become routine: one every two hours? What is it going to take for us to stand up and say No, we're going to protect children instead of guns? And how are we going to stop our children from being killed by adults and from killing other children and from seeing no meaning in their lives or trying to seek posthumous, seamy moments of glory on TV, which glorifies violence? When will we stand up against the culture of death and violence in our country? It is all interrelated. The United States leads the world in military expenditures and exports: we spend more in one week on the military than we spend annually on Head Start. Something is wrong with the values of a nation that would rather spend twenty or thirty thousand dollars to lock a child up after getting into trouble, but won't invest a few thousand dollars to get kids born healthy, to give them a head start, to give them a decent education. We must change these priorities. We're spending more testing on an unsuccessful Star Wars missile defense system to shield children against phantom external enemies than we spend in a year on immunizations and protecting them from violence at home. In this post-Cold War era, why in the world does the United States need to spend five times more than Russia, eleven times more than Germany, and nineteen times the combined spending of seven countries traditionally identified by the Pentagon as our most likely adversaries (you know them!) when our children are dying from the internal enemies of poverty and preventable sickness, and from gun violence and lack of health care? So at this incredible moral moment in history, your witness here says that it is time for all of us to teach our children that violence is not the way, and to close the hypocrisy gap between our words about violence and our glorification of violence and war in our culture. I think General Omar Bradley described our dilemma when he said, "We're stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. We have achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." Dr. King laid out the choice for us very clearly when he said, "Our choice is no longer one between violence and nonviolence in the world, it's between nonviolence and nonexistence." And Pablo Casals stated our responsibility to each of us when he asked, "When will we teach our children what they are? One should be able to say to them, 'Do you know who you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the world there is no other child exactly like you. In the millions of years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. One looks at your body, what a wonder. Your legs, your arms, your running fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven, you have the capacity for anything. You are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you harm another who is like you: a marvel?' We must teach our children their sacredness in the face of God, and teach them to see the sacred spark in every other child." We do not have an adult problem in America; we have a child problem in America. We point to our children and youth, and say, What in the world is the matter with them? We are what is the matter with them, we adults. And it is time for us to stand up and accept our adult responsibility to make every child feel safe and be safe. So let me just end with a prayer that I say a lot this year, to reaffirm what each of you knows, that we can remake this world, we must remake this world for our children. And I'm so grateful for all of your presence, because so many people are waiting for Gandhi to come back, or Dr. King to come back. They're not. We're it! And we have the capacity and the power to build a different world in a new era. Your presence here is a very important witness of that fact. But I feel inadequate most hours and most days, and say: Lord, I can't preach like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Jesse Jackson or turn a poetic phrase like Maya Angelou, but I care, and I'm willing to serve, and to use what talents I have to build a world of peace. I don't have Fred Shuttlesworth's and Harriet Tubman's courage or Andy Young's political skills, but I care, and I'm willing to serve. I can't sing like Fannie Lou Hamer or organize like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, or John Dear, but I care, and I'm willing to serve. I'm not holy like Archbishop Tutu, forgiving like Mandela, or disciplined like Gandhi, but I care and I'm willing to serve and to fight in a nonviolent manner. I'm not brilliant like Dr. Du Bois or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or as eloquent as Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington, but I care, and I'm willing to serve. I don't have Mother Teresa's saintliness, Dorothy Day's love, or Cesar Chavez's gentle, tough spirit, but I care and I'm willing to serve. God, it's not as easy as the Sixties to frame an issue and forge a solution, but I care, and I'm willing to serve. My mind and body are not as swift as in youth, and my energy comes in spurts but I care, and I'm willing to serve. I'm so young nobody will listen, I'm not sure what to say or do, but I care and am willing to serve. I can't see or hear well, speak good English, stutter sometimes, and get real scared, and I really hate risking criticism, but I care, and I'm willing to serve. Use me as Thou wilt to save Thy children today and tomorrow, and to build a nation and a world where no child is left behind, and every child is loved, and every child is safe. Thank you for caring.
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| ©2001 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
I
am deeply privileged to be here with these extraordinary witnesses
for peace and justice and nonviolence, and all of you who have come
to build a world that is fit and safe for our children. And we can
do that. The twentieth century has been characterized by stunning
scientific and technological progress: we split the atom, pierced
space, walked on the moon, landed on Mars, and broke the genetic
code. Instant communication has led to an information explosion
and daily money trading in the trillions. Polio and other child
vaccines have the potential to save millions of children's lives.
Many people live longer than ever before. We've learned to fly through
the air faster than the speed of sound and to cruise the seas faster
than the creatures inhabiting them. We've created the ability to
feed the world's population, witnessed astonishing increases in
wealth from a tiny microchip, and found we have the capacity to
prevent the poverty that still afflicts the majority of humankind.
