On Violence, Moral, Justice, and Liberty: The attainment of Peace by American People for American People and the World

On Violence, Moral, Justice, and Liberty:
The attainment of Peace by American People for
American People and the World
By Marco Antonio Flores Villanueva
(Speech delivered on June 2nd, 2007 at
Brookline Library, Massachusetts, USA)

June 2nd, 2007, seven years and six months after the beginning of the twenty-first century. The violent direction of the world has not changed at all. Madness, chaos, and human degradation dominate the planet. From Sudan to Iraq; from Venezuela to the military base at Guantanamo; from Lima, Peru to the African continent, we are still prisoners of our fears of each other resulting from our political and cultural differences. We remain reluctant to recognize the plurality of human kind and continue to impose our own vision of the world from our narrow and particular perspective.

For that reason, seven years after the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are more focused on annihilation and destruction rather than coexistence and rebuilding. We are more focused on violence and death rather than tolerance and life. In short, we are more focused on war rather than peace because we have not learned the lessons of our past nor those of more recent inhuman events, which took place during the twentieth century. Those events were the direct result of violence secondary to human fear and intolerance.

“The twentieth century” –as Niall Ferguson has pointed out in his latest book “The War of the World”- “was the bloodiest era in history. World War I killed between 9 million and 10 million people…another 59 million died in World War II…by one estimate, there were 16 conflicts throughout the last century that cost more than a million lives, a further six that claimed between 500, 000 and a million, and 14 that killed between 250, 000 and 500, 000. In all, between 167 million and 188 million people died because of organized violence in the 20th century –as many as one in every 22 deaths in that period”.

What are we doing today to avoid a new century of violence, blood, and madness? I am afraid we are not doing enough. In fact we are making the same mistakes and we are on our way to producing equally horrible results, over and over again.

I was told by one of my closest friends not to say anything about this in a public event. I think that is wrong for the future of our children. Considering the alarming historical context just described and the current state of the world, we should conclude that our past and present fears create the conditions necessary to reproduce extreme violence. However, silence is another kind of violence.

Silence is not a solution but part of the problem. Silence is living in denial and betrayal, ignoring the actual facts and evident reasons that are leading us to misfortune, destruction, and death. Poverty and economic injustice must be denounced. Misleading and political irresponsibility must be condemned. Deliberate misinformation and lies must be prosecuted. No man or woman in this country, and no man or woman on earth has the right to be silent before atrocity, brutality, abuse, and tragedy.

At this crucial moment in the history of the United States of America, in particular, and the world, in general, it is important to understand that only we, the people, have the power to end suffering and despair, violence and war, and turn the course of this country and the entire planet. Only we can relieve the pain, the grief, the sorrow, and distress of so many in America and throughout the world. It is our responsibility.

Politicians will not do it. They are part of the problem, submerged in their particular and partisan battles or hidden comfortably in the glacial pace of the Congress. They seem absolutely divorced from the daily struggle of the common man to live and survive. For that reason, the majority of the American people in a recent survey have rejected politicians with disapproval.

The judicial power will not do it. Today, more than ever in the history of this nation, the legal system is inescapably political and justice is much harder to come by for poor people who cannot afford good legal counsel

Media will not do it. As former vice-president Al Gore has pointed out in his latest book -“The Assault on Reason”- about the free press in the United States-, the truth is that “reading and writing simply do not play as important a role in how we interact with the world as they use to”. While newspapers decay and hardly make enough money to cover their own expenses, television reigns around the country under the control of corporations and their particular interests. No wonder the American press was recently found to be only, and I underline, only the fifty-third-freest in the world, according to a comprehensive international study conducted by the “Worldwide Press Freedom”, Index 2006.

This is our call. This is our moral responsibility. This is our task. Inspired by the miracle of being human, we must fight for life. Enlightened by the idealism of our Founders, we must fight for liberty. Persuaded of our destiny, we must pursue happiness.

We, the people…we the people. Do not forget or betray the subject, the cause, the beginning and the reason of this nation. We, the people. No heroes, only hope. No myth but reality. We are the only true road to our own salvation and the saviors of America.

Thank you.
marcoludmila@msn.com
www.marcofloresvillanueva.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/marcoflorescomposer
www.paginaslibres.blogspot.com