Quote of the Day

"I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die, the anger in me is beyond belief."

--Betty Williams
Nobel Peace Prize Winner
1976


In her acceptance speech, Ms. Williams said of the violent deaths of four young people on a Belfast street, on one sunny August afternoon: " Perhaps it was the fact that one of those children was a baby of six weeks in a pram pushed by his mother made that tragedy especially unbearable. Maybe it was because the three children from one family, baby Andrew, little John and eight-year-old Joanne McGuire died in one event which also periously injured their mother Anne, that the grief was so powerful. Perhaps it was the sheer needlessness of the awful loss of life...

And we do not forget the young republican, Danny Lennon, who lost his life that day. He may have been involved in trying to shoot soldiers that day and was himself shot dead, and some may argue that he got what he deserved. As far as we are concerned, every single death in the last eight years, and every death in every war that was ever fought represents life needlessly wasted...

We know that this insane and immoral unbalance of priorities cannot be changed overnight. We also know that it will not be changed without the greatest struggle, the incessant struggle to get the human race to stop wasting its vast resources on arms, and start investing in the people who must live out their lives on this planet we share...."

(And the sad thing is, this speech was given 30 years ago.)

Someday we must take seriously the words of Carl Sandburg: "Someday there will be a war, and no one will come." Obviously that day is not today.