QUOTES
The
International Declaration of Human Rights says the right to housing, health, education
should be guaranteed to everyone. The moment these things are provided, we will
have a different world order and nuclear weapons will become less of a threat.
I see nuclear
weapons as the ultimate evil, not just evil, but the ultimate evil with the potential
to make life unlivable on this planet.
nuclear
bombs have made mass murder a reality. Nuclear bombs threaten humankind.
As
long as we rationalize nuclear weapons as “necessary” in order to save American
lives, then nuclear weapons will never be gotten rid of.
Evil
is the infliction of torture, torment, and death on innocent people. That is evil.
We can be very sophisticated and define it in various ways, but evil is ultimately
the destruction of a noncombatant, an innocent human being. Evil is terrible.
And so is the banality of evil that reconfigures words to make evil more acceptable:
We call human beings “collateral damage,” for example. “Collateral damage,” as
though a human life was a box that you crushed when you stepped on it by mistake.
Indifference
makes hate possible. It is the beginning of dehumanization. And indifference reflects
another aspect of our modernity: the concept of markets. Markets control everything.
Markets dominate human interaction. We have markets in the church, markets in
medicine, markets of the spirit. This way of thinking reduces subjects to objects.
Everything becomes a commodity, even people. Nothing has existential value. Nothing
has eternity. Nothing has miraculousness. Nothing surprises or astonishes. We
no longer approach humanity with an attitude of “reverence for life,” as Albert
Schweitzer used to proclaim.
Infant
mortality could be abolished with the money we’re spending on war. Those funds
could solve the problem of world hunger and do much to reduce the tragedy of AIDS.
Or we could provide clean drinking water for the whole world. Dirty water accounts
for 80 percent of all global illness. A small shift in priorities could give us
a world that is peaceful and livable.
We
will forever live with the danger of nuclear weapons because the nuclear genie
has been let out of the bottle. Knowledge cannot be erased once it arrives. That’s
the nature of ideas, that’s the nature of scientific advancement, and that’s the
nature of widening the horizon of human understanding. The point is that you have
to learn to live with the world that has been created, but to do this we must
structure a society that is less asymmetric and more equal. We must find a way
to make sure that the fruits produced by the world are enjoyed equally. That doesn’t
mean everybody will be equal, but that people will not feel constantly cheated
out of their patrimony, or their God-given rights like shelter, food, health,
and education and therefore not be denied their human potential. The International
Declaration of Human Rights says the right to housing, health, education should
be guaranteed to everyone. The moment these things are provided, we will have
a different world order and nuclear weapons will become less of a threat.
We
physicians have focused on the nuclear threat as the singular issue of our era.
We are not indifferent to other human rights and hard-won civil liberties. But
first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all
rights, which preconditions all others; the right to survival.
May
we learn from barbaric and bloody deeds of the twentieth century and bestow the
gift of peace to the next millenium.
Each
step is a grain of sand, but we are shaping many grains of sand into a beach that
will—one day—contain oceans of possibility
