OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: YES we can have a Nuke Free World: PUSH Obama

The time is ripe, "To blow the dynamite...It is about time to blow the lid off."-Peter Maurin

"We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living."- General Omar Nelson Bradley, Armistice Day, 1948.

"You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life."- Lewis Mumford, 1946

"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 not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."-Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

America possesses 11,000 nuclear weapons with many in excess of 20,000,000 tons of TNT [the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 12,000 tons] yet claims to be based on Judeo-Christian ethics, but "How can you kill people, when it is written in God's commandment: "Thou shalt not murder'?"-- Leo Tolstoy.

"A country that has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality"Praying for peace is like praying for a weedless garden. Nothing will happen until you get your hands dirty." -John K. Stoner, co-founder of Every Church A Peace Church

"The duty of the Christian at this time is to do the one task God has imposed upon us in this world today. The task is to work for the total abolition of war. There can be no question that unless war is abolished; the world will remain constantly in a state of madness"The church [meaning all Christians] must lead the way on the road to the abolition of war"Peace is to be preached and nonviolence is to be explained and practiced"It is the great Christian task of our time. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends upon it."- Thomas Merton

When FDR met with labor leaders in 1934, after four hours of meeting, he said, 'You've convinced me that you are right. Now, go out there and FORCE ME TO DO IT.'

What he meant, was that the pressures on a President to stay with the status quo, the forces of the economic and political elites of the country so enormous, that even when a President wants to change course, he requires the support of forces that will push him in the correct direction.

On September 24, 2009, President Obama is organizing a nuclear weapons summit in New York and another in D.C. in 2010.

On April 5, 2009, President Obama raised the hopes of millions with his promises in Prague:

"We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change. We're here today because of the courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and no matter what they look like. We are here today because the simple and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a people.

"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked - that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

"As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act"It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, 'Yes, we can.'

"There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted. We must confront it by standing together as free nations, as free people. I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together.

"Let us honor our past by reaching for a better future. Let us bridge our divisions, build upon our hopes, and accept our responsibility to leave this world more prosperous and more peaceful than we found it. Together we can do it.

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