Greenfield Recorder, February 21, 2022
MY TURN
By DR. E. MARTIN SCHOTZ
The Buddhists have a saying – “When the people are ready, the leader will arise.” But what happens if the leader arises before the people are ready?
The United States once had a president who made a radical turn toward world peace, not the peace of a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by weapons of war,” but the “genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that allows men and nations to grown and to hope and to build a better life for their children … not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women …”
He imagined a peace based not on “a revolution in human nature, but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.” He understood that there is “no simple key,” and “no magic formula” and that genuine peace must be “the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenges of each new generation. Peace is a process — a way of solving problems. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbors — it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.”
He knew that this would be a long slow process, but he began taking our nation on that path. On June 10, 1963 President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at American University in which he outlined his ideas about peace and how to step out of the arms race and the cold war thinking, in which our society was steeped. His speech is every bit as relevant today as it was more than a half century ago — testimony to how true his words were.
In this speech President Kennedy urged us to re-examine our attitudes toward world peace, our attitudes toward Russia and the Cold War, and our attitudes toward peace and freedom here at home. He did not just speak. He began to act and the world began to witness tangible results in the form of peaceful cooperation between the United States and the then Soviet Union. At the end of President Kennedy’s speech, he said, “And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights — the right to live our lives without fear of devastation — the right to breathe air as nature provided it — the right of future generations to a healthy existence?”
But he was not permitted to continue his work. And we as a people weren’t ready to take up his ideas, continue his efforts, and make them our reality.
“… The right to live our lives without fear of devastation – the right to breathe air as nature provided it – the right of future generations to a healthy existence.”
None of these rights can be achieved, none of the major problems facing humanity today can be solved without peace. Our children need us to recognize this. Our children need us to start truly educating ourselves about peace and organizing to see that we have it.
One step we can take this Presidents Day, Monday Feb. 21, is to sit down with family, friends, and neighbors and listen to and/or read President Kennedy’s American University speech. It can be found online here: https://bit.ly/3JGvy8s After doing this, consider reaching out to a local peace group and joining in continuing President Kennedy’s efforts. If we want to have a leader like this again, this is what it means for us as a people to get ready.
Dr. E. Martin Schotz is a retired physician. He resides in Cummington. He is a member of Franklin Country for Peace, a project of Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, a member of the Peace Taskforce of Franklin Country Continuing the Political Revolution, and a member of Mass Peace Action.