Tuesday, September 3, 2002

"You know, I have so little to say here this evening, but there's so many things that have been said over and over again that need to be said again and again. And, it's too small a planet—it grows smaller all the time in terms of travel time. We are becoming one family. We share each other's technology and culture and poetry and philosophy. And we have to begin to think of ourselves as a family. We have to begin to enjoy the differences in the human family like we enjoy the differences in a garden of flowers. And there's a race on—and the real race and the real ideological conflict is between those universalists who want to think in terms of mankind and those reversions to barbarity and tribalism, who are still hung up in ancient, anachronistic hatreds like we see in Ulster, like we see in Israel, Palestine. That we can see in so many parts of the world. Without some system of world law we're lost. And we can't have a system of law without a sense of community. And we can't have a sense of community without the underpinning of recognition of ourselves as parts of one family. "And there's very little time left to muster this broader vision against the ancient, conditioned reflexes and psychoses of mankind and his homicidal tendencies. But either we learn to live together, or we die together. Is it necessary—is it necessary to have to repeat after 2,000 years all the things that you people read in Sunday School? How—how absent-minded—how forgetful!" —I.F. Stone From a lecture given by I.F. Stone at the Ford Hall Forum. Broadcast on National Public Radio on April 12, 1983. Used by the Kronos Quartet with the permission of National Public Radio) 3:27:58 AM