TUTU: It’s an extraordinary idea and, it fills one with a great deal of excitement and exhilaration, and it sounds crazy, but then I think it was crazy when Gandhi said we’re going to work so that eventually India is free. It must have been crazy when Martin Luther King Jr. also said we’re going to make civil rights a real issue in the United States, and maybe when Nelson Mandela and others said one day apartheid will be no more, that we need those like yourselves who dream dreams and say, “It is possible. It is possible for people to know that war is not natural.”
...People have been able to live peacefully together, but if they live peacefully together after war, why should they have war first before they can realize that it is a great deal better. War is not nice to children, it’s not nice to people, it’s not nice to the environment.
...And so I say go for it. This is marvellous. Go for it and really be crazy and say, one day we’ll ask, “Why were we so stupid for so long because of something so obvious?” Saying let us put our massive investment that we are putting right now in instruments of death and destruction, let us put them into something that is creative, that is life-enhancing teaching kids that there are ways of resolving differences that don’t need to be violent. You can sit down and ultimately say, “You know, actually, an enemy is a friend waiting to be made.”
Someone once said “we cannot live to see it all”.
There is no relief in that merry knowledge,
Witnessing the vacant waving of flags
And apple polisher’s parade toward destruction.
Is it an eternal conscience, our tumbledown end?
Might we by careening with our fate suffer less?
Along the way may we not beckon of resistance?
We, in this, be not alone, but one with humanity.
Is it not then hopeful?
Is it not then merry
Our seeking to ebb the world’s headlong calamity?
If it be so, then cease your foolish exaggeration,
End all of your fanatical cries of evil and terror!
Err on the side of our freshly burning world,
And unite in the hunt for harmony’s gate.
O! Not the shrill and hasty clout of national anthems!
We shall soon enough have cause for none;
Instead we should, we must, parade as one.
Let us live to see it all prepared for our children.
Copyright © 2006 mrp
The Peace Alliance
Peace Kids
WE CANNOT LIVE TO SEE IT ALL
