Let’s listen to Iran’s president
Eleanor Roosevelt: “We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.”
Every generation, it becomes clear, has to relearn the old lessons: war diminishes us, destroys hundreds of thousands of potentials and even when some form of victory is declared it is a rare conclusion that exceeds what has been lost.
Politicians and pundits often state that war is a last resort for them, but it soon becomes apparent which ones have never carried a suitcase into any other resort. Fox News and the Daily News well understand how to harness the power of hate because it is an animal built for the yoke. But the yoked plow fields that can never feed a single soul, save for the gunsmith and the mortician, who measure their well being in blood.
It is easy to be for hate, easy to lose the distinction between the hateful and the hated, easy to avoid any chance for dialogue and with it, the chance for peaceful compromise. It is too hard for them, too great a task, too much to ask one ounce of real effort to forge the steel of peace. That burden can only be borne by the hardy, the strong and the wise, not those conditioned to always take the easy way out, the path to war, the journey they will demand others to march from their safe and easy chairs.
Great majorities of the Iranian citizenry have no quarrel with our citizens. Most admire and emulate the fruits of our culture and civilization. But they have politicians and pundits, too, some just as eager to promote the easy way, the lazy way, the ways that risk war. Iran’s citizens often feel helpless to stop their leaders’ provocations. Just as many of us often feel as helpless about the endless threats emanating from ours.
“… and if we are to live together we have to talk.” And listen. And think. And create from that the only foundations that can ever support real peace.
I join the call of the Columbia Coalition and join the majorities in both lands eager and ready to pour those foundations and do the heavy lifting. Let us not yield to the war promoters. The results of their folly is too fresh in the mind and leaves too many lost loved ones less than fully mourned.
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:27 am
Firstly, I find it slightly offensive to genuine liberals that you would link off to that nonsense from the Columbia “progressives” by quoting the great Eleanor Roosevelt.
I support letting him speak at Columbia. Universities should be an open forum of ideas and opinions, and more importantly, they are a private institution. If it bothers the alums and the major donors so much, let them address it with their check books.
However, it would be nice if the extremists at Columbia could be consistent on this front. They have shouted down Minute men, members of Jihad Watch, and others with a more conservative perspective. They have never concerned themselves with the kind of message that indeed sent. But, a totalitarian religious fanatic comes to speak on their campus, and the “progressives” propose silence? Liberalism is truly dead.
The neo-progressives are concerned about the message a demonstration might send. Where is this concern when they march with Stalinist apologists in the ANSWER Coalition? Where is this concern when their “peace” marches revert to chants of “long live the intifada”? I’ve marched in them, I’ve heard it and seen it all.
So the message is pretty clear–it’s ok to endorse a protest when you’re obstructing business at the World Bank, or blocking the VP’s motorcade. However, when a truly disturbed world leader, one who leads a regime responsible for over a decade of global terror, comes to Columbia–we go silent.
Who cares what tacit endorsement comes from a protest? Nobody cares what a small group of radicals on a college campus think anyway. The bolder gesture would be to speak out, be consistent and stand by the principles they claim to espouse.
But that would make sense. That would be the right thing to do. Far be it for the well educated students at Columbia to know the difference.
Lenin once referred to the “useful idiots” of the West. I fear he is once again being proven correct.
September 23rd, 2007 at 11:09 am
I agree: Let Ahmadinejad speak - his rants will only serve to show how little of peace he truly seeks. HeR