A Christmas Message
In this holiday season, with our nation and others at war, a few thoughts about some of the inevitable consequences of such hostilities come to mind. A general and President offered these comments, which I find to be especially appropriate:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
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This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under a cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Is there no other way the world may live?
(U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the “Chance for Peace” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953.)