And the world impoverishes itself, by spending
a trillion dollars a year on preparations
for war and by employing perhaps half the
scientists and half the technologists on the
planet in military endeavors.
How would we explain all this to a dispatched
extraterrestrial observer?
What account would we give of our stewardship
of the planet Earth?
We have heard the rationale offered by the
superpowers.
We know who speaks for the nations, but who
speaks for the human species?
Who speaks for Earth?
From an extraterrestrial perspective our global
civilization is clearly on the edge of failure
in the most important task it faces: preserving
the lives and well-being of its citizens and
the future habitability of the planet.
But if we're willing to live with the growing
likelihood of nuclear war, shouldn't we also
be willing to explore vigorously every possible
means to prevent nuclear war?
Shouldn't we consider in every nation major
changes in the traditional ways of doing things,
a fundamental restructuring of economic, political,
social and religious institutions?
We've reached a point where there can be no
more special interests or special cases, nuclear
arms threaten every person the Earth.
Fundamental changes in society are sometimes
labelled impractical or contrary to human
nature.
As if nuclear war were practical, or as if
there were only one human nature.
But fundamental changes can clearly be made,
we're surrounded by them.
In the last two centuries abject slavery,
which was with us for thousands of years,
has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring
world-wide revolution.
Women, systemically mistreated for millennia,
are gradually gaining the political and economic
power traditionally denied to them.
And some wars of aggression have recently
been stopped, or curtailed, because of a revulsion
felt by the people in the aggressor nations.
The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious
chauvinism and to rapid, national fervor are
beginning not to work.
A new consciousness is developing which sees
the Earth as a single organism and recognizes
that an organism at war with itself, is doomed.
We are one planet.
