“The world today is faced with the greatest threat to peace in world history: the threat of nuclear war and human devastation. Nuclear war would produce peace—an imposed, maybe a permanent peace. War and death on an unprecedented scale. Against that danger we can array only the forces of peace—the legions of those who care first for people, and only later, much later, about power…"
Our Quote of the Week is an urgent reminder that our own ability to cultivate peace—simply by caring for others—is our best defense against the most sinister threat to our collective existence, nuclear war. We reflect on these words as we remember the 80th anniversary of the United States’ deployment of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II on August 6 and 9.
This week, we share Sargent Shriver’s 1981 Address at the Second National Conference of Former Peace Corps Volunteers and Staff. During his tenure as the first Peace Corps Director in the 1960s, Shriver infused the Peace Corps with a belief in every individual’s duty and ability to build peace. This belief went hand in hand with his commitment to service. Of his own time with the Peace Corps, he says:
“The Peace Corps gave me the most memorable, continuing, morally unblemished and uncompromised chance ever given any American to serve his country, his countrymen, and his fellow human beings world-wide, simultaneously, and at the grassroots level with the poor everywhere. Never in war, and I have served in war; never in peace and I have served many places in peace, has anyone ever received, from a secular state, a greater opportunity for pure service.”
Shriver confronts the misguided idea that the Peace Corps cannot help with national security, with saving lives. He says:
“I used the word power [...] to emphasize the power of peace. It is peace that gives strength. It is peace that provides ‘the force'—an unconquerable, unsurpassable force ... not arms, not bombs, not fear or threat of destruction. Those things just arouse resistance and resentment. They produce the opposite of what they intend. The alleged ‘power of arms’ is a sham. The man with the pistol in his hand blazing away is the pitiful, fearful weakling afraid of another person, killing and marauding like a frustrated child because he’s angry and hurt and alone and desperate, looking for love and finding only hatred and opposition.”
As we continue to see tendencies towards war and other acts of violence persist at home and around the world, may we each pledge to “care first for people” and to sow peace, so that as a collective, we work to avoid an unthinkable escalation to a war from which none of us can recover.
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