I started this blog wanting to promote peace both internally and across the planet. It seems to me that peace is possible if we raise our consciousness and expand our compassion. The following thought provoking quote by President Eisenhower is just the kind of consciousness we need to end war. Please read and contemplate these ideas and join me in working for peace as if the world depends on us. It does.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?”
–Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.
I found this over at Buzzflash.com a great resource for questioning what is going on in our world. Here are some questions I see as important to ask:
- When will we see the true cost of war to all in this nation?
- When will our leaders go beyond the ego’s need for power and control?
- When will compassion for all humanity win and end the insanity of war?
- When will we be awake enough as a nation to see beyond the emptiness of fear and instead choose peace?
- When will we grow wise enough to see that building for war can only lead to war?
- When will education, health, and well-being of all of us matter more than the words of the heartless who call for war?
The Iraq War never needed to happen but for the ego’s of those who started it here in our country. The Afghanistan war is an impossible war to win and yet we poor billions into it at great cost to our economy and to the future of this nation. Is this ok with you?
When will the insanity end? Please take a look in the mirror, the person you are hoping will end the madness of war is the one looking back at you.