All my life, I have felt connected to the stars. As a boy, I walked at night in the garden of my grandfather King’s house, looking up at the dazzling lights in the sky. One world was not enough for me. I wrote stories about the explorations of the stars that I knew human beings would undertake. My tales landed me in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and in a book entitled Pioneers of Wonder.
As I went through my long life I encountered one glorious being after another. I began to become aware of the tremendous role played by humanity in the development of the amazing planet called the Earth.
I became aware of the spiritual wisdom of the saints and prophets; the writers of the Gospels and the soaring poets, ranging from Rumi to Shakespeare; the creators of great music, ranging from the singers of songs in all languages to the deep composers, Bach and Puccini and Beethoven, realizing that there were no limits to the creations pouring forth from the human soul. I found everlasting pleasure in the lines of William Blake—The one “who kisses joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.”
I have just put together a book, which encompasses my life’s experiences with the many kinds of writing I have composed—beginning with my imaginary trips to the far stars and the pains of hunger endured with many people in the dark days of the 1930s. When I went to the University of Kansas City, my professors encouraged me to shift from science fiction to the practice of journalism.
My last story for an interstellar magazine was called “Star Ship Invincible.” It described what happened to a group of people who attempted to travel from Earth to Jupiter in a new vessel built to be strong enough to pass through any pressures brought against it. But that ship was not invincible after all. It fell into a Black Hole, a void in space that could not be passed through.
The ship was absorbed into another universe from which it could not escape. The attempts of human beings to go into other dimensions were not achievable. They could not tell what had happened to them. They had traveled beyond their finite limits.
My next experience was to write a story about a man caught in the tortures of hunger—whose only solace came from a recording of human laughter. In a day of desperation he tried to sell that recording to an old pawnbroker, but the old man did not find it worth more than a few dollars. The old man was wounded by the anguish in that roar of laughter. “Shut it off,” the broker said. “Please shut it off.”
The young man went back into the freezing night from which he had come. The old man was alone with the echoes of that defiant mirth in his shop filled with the precious things sold to him by people who were dying of thirst and hunger. That was the state of the world for many people in those years of pain and poverty.
That story was broadcast on the NBC radio network and reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, edited by Edward O’Brien in England. It caught the attention of editors on the Kansas City Star, and I was hired by that paper as a reporter although I had never taken a course in journalism. The managing editor, C. G. Wellington, said he was reluctant to take me on—because I reminded him of Ernest Hemingway, a writer he had employed there in 1917. Wellington said Hemingway had promised him to make a lifetime career on the Star—and then had run off to be an ambulance drive in World
War I.
Hemingway came to Kansas City soon after the publication of his great book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the Civil War in Spain when General Franco overthrew the Spanish Republic and created a dictatorship there. Hemingway visited the Star on a night when Wellington was not there—and I had a chance to show him some of my stories. “You’ve got good stuff, kid,” Hemingway said. “But if you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to get out of Kansas City. The world is changing fast, kid. You have to go places.”
I followed his advice and went to New York in January 1941. I landed a job on the Associated Press staff in Rockefeller Center, and dealt with news pouring in from all parts of the planet. Then I was appointed to a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. In January 1943, I was drafted into the United States Army and became a war correspondent.
I landed in Normandy in 1944 and rode with General George Patton’s Third Army across France and into Paris. The liberation of Paris on a golden day in August was one of the most exhilarating joys of my life. The Nazi forces which had occupied that beautiful city in 1940 retreated from our troops in disarray. As they retreated, they were fired upon by the Free French under the command of General Charles de Gaulle.
We were aware of the fact that Adolf Hitler, the Nazis’ leader, had ordered the German general in command of Paris to set fire to the city. But he had refused to do so. Hitler kept asking: “Is Paris burning?” but no answer was given to him. The innate humanity of a German officer was more powerful than Hitlerism.
I was one of the American soldiers who were received with hugs and kisses when we entered the city. I appreciated the warm welcome given to us by the French people, particularly the French girls.
We rushed into the bars, followed by the girls. While we drank bottles of champagne, we rejected the offers of the girls for unlimited sexual services. When I shouted: “I’m a married man!” the girls murmured: “When the war’s over, you can go back to your wife, but you’re over here now. You ought to be grateful for what we can give you now.” I didn’t take advantage of the offers. I wanted to survive—and get back to my wife in New York with a good body. On our honeymoon, she had given me everything a woman could give to a man, and I hoped we would have many years of such enjoyments.
When the Nazis surrendered, I flew home. I had received a Certificate of Distinguished Service from Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, one of Gen. Eisenhower’s deputy commanders, and I returned to the AP with a sense of recognition that I had given three years of my life to the struggle against Nazism. Many of my friends had been wounded or killed—and I had interviewed many wounded men as a War Correspondent. Yet, I had not been crippled or injured. I thanked the Lord of the Universe for the blessings he had given me, but I had not received the punishment I expected.
The AP did not give me the raise in salary I expected. Barbara and I celebrated my return by deep lovemaking and we had produced a wonderful child, a boy we named Terence Francis Kelly. The cost of living was rising and so I moved from the AP to the National Housing Agency, where I served as an information specialist and earned a much larger salary. During the war a housing shortage had developed, and President Truman had launched a large-scale building program designed to meet the needs of millions of veterans and others whose lives had been disrupted by the war.
I liked the Housing Agency and I knew that its work was important. But I could not resist a tempting offer from a public relations agency, the Fitzgerald Company, which had been founded by a friend of mine. I left that agency to become a consultant to the National Book Publishers Council and then to serve as the U.S. director of the Study of World News conducted by the International Press Institute, which had received a large grant from the Ford Foundation.
Before I joined the Study of World News, I served as the Washington director of Averell Harriman’s 1952 campaign to become the Democratic candidate for president. Harriman had the kind of experience that I thought a president should have. He had been the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, the Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the director of Truman’s Security Agency, and one of the administrators of the Marshall Plan, which had revived Europe after the war. I went with him across the United States in a chartered plane, and wrote speeches for him indicating that he was dedicated to the liberal program on which Truman had won his victory in 1948. But the nomination went to Adlai Stevenson, who had been elected governor of Illinois that year.
Stevenson offered me a place on his staff, but I was eager to get out of politics and I became vice president of the Fitzgerald agency again. Then I leaped over to take part in the Study of World News, which had been started by the Ford Foundation under the leadership of Lester Markel, Sunday editor of the NY Times.
The study got under way in September of 1952, when staffs were organized in Zurich, Switzerland; New York; and Madras, India. W. MacNeil Lowry, formerly chief Washington correspondent for the Cox newspapers, was given operating responsibility for the entire project. Lowry asked me to take charge of the work in the United States.
Arrangements were made with a group of ten leading researchers in American journalism schools, headed by Dr. Ralph Casey of the University of Minnesota, to measure the amounts of foreign news printed in American papers. The news flowing on agency wires from all over the world was surveyed by the IPI staff in New York. The wire reports of all the major news agencies were made available by the agencies for study during the same weeks.
Ninety-three of the American papers were put on the list through a statistical sampling method used by Dr. Chilton Bush, head of the Institute for Journalistic Studies at Stanford University. The list gave fair representation to morning and evening papers, papers in different regions of the countries, papers representing a cross-section of American journalism.
For purposes of comparison with this list, a separate list of large papers was prepared. Papers in Europe and India were selected by the IPI staff in consultation with editors involved. Forty-eight papers in Western Europe and 28 in India were chosen for examination. The communist papers in the Soviet bloc and in China were not included however. It was assumed that these papers were instruments of government propaganda.
When all the phases of the IPI studies were completed in the spring of 1953, the IPI had the largest assemblage of facts and ideas about the handling of news around the world. The reports eventually released by the IPI showed the gaps and discrepancies in the handling of such information—and created enduring controversies about the prejudices shown by editors who favored certain countries and disfavored others.
Lester Markel had declared in 1952 that “the main objective of the Institute is to bring out greater world understanding through a better flow of information.” My participation in this vast project led me to believe that the task was almost impossible.
In my 92 years on this planet, I have been a professor of communication and disseminator of information to illuminate the tremendous tasks of the human species. I have been appalled by the human capacity for evil and uplifted by the enormous capacity for good.
We are evolutionary giants with origins linked to the cosmic explosion that brought the universe into being. We are composed of whirling atoms and glowing molecules beyond our comprehension. Albert Einstein, the greatest thinker of the 20th Century, who brought us into the nuclear age, which may destroy us all, decided that we were created by a Spirit we could never understand. We can never understand how far we have come and how far we may have to go.
We are electromagnetic fields of energy and yet many of us may become Glorious Beings rising like mountains on new horizons. As the poet William Blake said, we can kiss joy as it flies and live in eternity’s sunrise. We can respond to the never-ending allurements we were born to enjoy.
I have come here tonight to talk about humanity’s future and to hear your views on what the future may hold for us. When I was a young writer of science fiction, I walked in darkness, fearing the terrible disasters that might lie ahead of us. Yet, I went from one great experience to another.
My mother gave me the name of King. That was her maiden name—Martha King—and she wanted me to have it. She married a man named Kelly, who sacrificed much of his manhood on a battlefield in France, and she did not want me to be completely identified with an Irish name and Irish history. So I have gone through life with a resounding name—Frank King Kelly. When I am down, overwhelmed by the awful things I have endured, I shout my name out loud: “Frank King Kelly!” and I feel related to all the Kings and Kellys in the amazing history of humankind!
How was it possible for me as a boy to endure the blows of bullies in my first years in school? Why was I given a scholarship at the U. of Kansas City? How did one of my stories get into a collection of Best American Short Stories when I was 21? How did I get the advice I needed from a great writer, Ernest Hemmingway, who urged me to get out into the world and overcome my fears?
When I went to New York, I couldn’t sell enough stories to survive there, even though I got some unexpected income by writing about the frustrated lives of girls in New York and Washington. I was given a chance to write these “true stories” for a magazine edited by a man who was a friend of one of my professors in Kansas City. He persuaded me to put more “zing” in those stories—and I made enough money to live well in New York until I got a good job on the AP staff. One of my stories was featured in a volume of these “true romances,” and I wrote about them in an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Synthetic Sin.”
In Manhattan I became a special correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other papers across the country. I wrote an article about the successful campaign against prejudice being conducted by a state commission against discrimination, which had been fighting against racial, religious, and national group prejudices for 2 ½ years. Commission Chairman Charles Garside disclosed that the AFL Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, and Express and Station Employees had repealed regulations that had restricted Negroes. The union had also eliminated from its constitution all the provisions that restricted membership to White persons.
I was happy to write about such actions because I hated the treatment then given to Blacks, immigrants, and other minorities in American society. When I was a reporter on the Kansas City Star, I rode ambulances from the General Hospital to the scenes of fires, murders, and accidents. When we saw Black people in any of those painful situations, the ambulance went speeding by. The ambulance drivers told me: “We don’t stop for Blacks. They’ve got their own hospitals and their own ambulances.” I was horrified by the separation of human beings in the city where I had been born.
I tried to get the city editor of the Star to let me do a series of articles on the brutality I had seen at the city jail, where police officers routinely beat homeless men who were arrested for wandering in the streets. “We can’t get the cops down on us,” he said. “We need their help in many places.” I saw the corruption in the police force and other agencies, but I quickly gave up my efforts to expose what needed to be done. I found out that I wasn’t a crusader.
When I was offered a job as a researcher and speech writer for President Truman, I knew he had been elected with the backing of a notorious political machine—the Pendergast organization, run by Boss Tom Pendergast. My liberal friends urged me to keep away from that organization. “If you work for Truman, you’ll be regarded as a crook or subnormal mentally,” one of these friends said.
But I had been told by reporters who investigated Truman that he was not personally involved in any of Pendergast’s chicanery. Pendergast had endorsed Truman because he was widely admired for his personal integrity. My wife and my literary agent, Mary Abbot, were convinced that Truman was a fine man. They admired the work he had done in trying to eliminate overcharging by the corporations, which had made huge profits in World War II.
When I got a call from the White House in the spring of 1948, asking me to do research and writing for Truman in the Presidential campaign that year, I was reluctant to take it seriously. I didn’t know anyone on his staff. I was astonished when I learned that Kenneth Birkhead, one of my friends who had been a student with me at the University of Kansas City, had recommended me. He had told Clark Clifford and Bill Batt, the two men who were organizing Truman’s “whistle stop” train trips, that I was a fast writer who had written articles for many newspapers and I shared Truman’s ideas about giving full rights to people of all colors and creeds.
So I went to Washington, helped to draft the Democratic platform, wrote drafts of many of the speeches Truman delivered from the backend of his campaign train, and shared in Truman’s unexpected triumph at the polls.
I hadn’t sought any appointment on Truman’s White House staff. I was prepared to go back to the Fitzgerald agency, but my friends at the Atlantic Monthly had persuaded the president of Boston University to offer me an appointment as a professor of communications there. The Atlantic press had just published my first serious novel—a book entitled An Edge of Light, about my role as an AP editor in New York—and they said that a professorship at Boston University would give me a stable income and enough free time to write books.
On the night in November when Truman’s so shocking triumph set off celebrations by delighted Democrats in Washington and other cities, Barbara and I drank champagne together and packed our few belongings into suitcases and prepared to move to a house in a Boston suburb. We didn’t realize that we would spend only a few months in Boston. When I arrived at the university, a secretary told me: “A Senator with a fancy name has been calling you from Washington. I’ve put a note on your desk.”
The Senator was Scott Lucas of Illinois. He told me that he was scheduled to be the Majority Leader of the Senate, succeeding Alben Barkley of Kentucky, who had been elected Vice President on the Truman ticket. He said he needed a speech written and asked me to join his staff in January of 1949.
The president of Boston University was negative toward the idea when I talked to him about it. “You want to run back to Washington when you’ve just been appointed here as an associate professor?” Daniel Marsh said, angrily. “I won’t give you a leave of absence for any such purpose.”
My friends at the Atlantic Monthly were negative also, and urged me to stay in Boston. Members of the White House staff said, however, that Lucas would be a key factor in getting Truman’s proposals enacted by a Senate largely controlled by conservative Southern Democrats.
I stayed four months on the faculty in Boston, and I found my students responsive to my arguments for the kind of progressive agenda offered by Truman. Truman had strongly supported the formation of the United Nations; he had desegregated the American armed forces; he had favored an expansion of the social security system and a national health program. In his inaugural address in January 1949, he had declared that every human being had a right to “a decent, satisfying life.” He offered encouragement to the rising movement for women’s attainment to the highest positions in every field.
I found that the students I had in my classes at Boston University—most of them war veterans—backed the creation of international laws to bring principles of justice into the world community. They admired Truman’s willingness to confront critics and reactionary opponents. I finally returned to Washington to work for the Senate leader and to participate in struggles against McCarthyism, the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and other bigots.
I had lived through the oppressive years when one-third of the people had lived in poverty and despair while the federal government under President Hoover had been virtually paralyzed. I favored a new democracy with places for everybody.
But Senator Lucas was defeated when he ran for re-election—beaten by a man named Everett Dirksen, whose nickname was “the Wizard of Ooze.” The American Medical Association sponsored pamphlets denouncing Truman’s health plan and many doctors took part in the opposition to Lucas because he had supported that plan.
After Lucas was rejected by the voters, I stayed on for two years with his successor as the Senate Leader, Ernest McFarland of Arizona. McFarland was a good-hearted man, but he was not a very progressive legislator. I left my job as the staff director of the Senate Majority Policy Committee, and plunged into other activities.
I helped the American Book Publishers Council repel attempts by right-wing groups to censor books, and I served as the U.S. director of an International Press Institute study of international news. That study revealed that many American newspapers carried only small amounts of news from other countries—and revealed that many Americans were not aware of significant developments in other parts of a rapidly changing world.
When the Soviet Union succeeded in putting a man into space, I urged my fellow Americans to applaud that achievement. I was an advocate of cooperation between the two powerful nations. I proposed that a statue be presented to the people of the Soviet Union as a gift from the American people just as the gift to the United States of the Statue of Liberty from France symbolized friendship between two great nations.
My proposal came to the attention of leaders of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. Citizens’ Dialogue, which had been promoting exchange visits since 1979 to create “trust and understanding” between the two countries. I was one of 29 Americans invited to make a trip to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1983. I made a speech in the Kremlin, emphasizing the dangers of nuclear weapons. I said that those weapons endangered the survival of life on earth.
I also told the Soviets about my participation in efforts to establish a National Peace Academy. The Academy was dedicated to the education and training of professional peacemakers and to the dissemination of information about the developing art of peaceful conflict resolution. I had participated in a citizen’s movement with 30,000 members, which led to the approval of the Peace Academy project by both houses of Congress and the construction of a U.S. Institute of Peace on the mall in Washington.
The part of my speech in Moscow, which aroused the most discussion, was my suggestion that either the U.S. or the Soviet Union should dismantle half of its nuclear weapons and invite the world to witness that event. “Would not that nation open a new era, with humanity set free from the nightmare of a nuclear war?” I asked the Soviet leaders who took part in our dialogue. Afterwards, a Soviet official approached me and said that he personally liked the idea. Then he added: “But wouldn’t the nation that endorsed such a proposal be accused of weakness?”
I said that I didn’t think that the building of thousands of such bombs should be considered a sign of strength. The arms race is a road to planetary suicide, I said. Why do you consider the present situation as a state of progress? The American people believe that you are prepared to inflict catastrophic blows on the Western countries—and you believe that we are prepared to kill millions of men, women, and children in the Soviet nations.
When I visited Moscow and other parts of the Soviet Union in 1983, the Soviets like Brezhnev were believed to be firmly in control of enormous forces. None of the commentators predicted the rise of a Gorbachev and the rapid disintegration of the Soviet empire. No one predicted that Ronald Reagan, a right-wing Republican, would take big steps to end the Cold War.
On my visit to the Soviet Union in 1983, I found that the people there had a deep fear of another war. Many young people had seen films and television programs that depicted how many things Americans had—houses, cars, many personal possessions. The Soviet young people no longer believed in the promises of communism. They wanted to be free to pursue happiness in the American style. When I came back and reported on their commitment to peace and their friendliness toward Americans, many people in Santa Barbara thought I had been brainwashed and deceived. When I reminded them that President Truman had predicted to me that the Soviet system would collapse—and that Russia would seek friendly relations with the United States—many Americans did not accept such a hopeful view of the future.
Like Truman, however, I had come close to death many times, and I shared his deep feeling that human beings could be “glorious beings,” eventually capable of building a global society. I shared his admiration for the poem by Alfred Tennyson entitled” Locksley Hall,” written in 1842. Truman carried a copy of it in his wallet, and frequently referred to it.
The English author wrote:
“For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that could be;
Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations’ aerial navies grappling in the central blue;
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world…”
I was amazed by Tennyson’s predictions in that poem and pleased by Truman’s long look forward. But I, too, had expected human beings to build a planetary organization and enter into a global acceptance of all creeds and cultures.
When I worked on the Democratic platform, which Truman advocated in his 1948 campaign, we approved statements supporting “the effective international control of all weapons of mass destruction, including the atomic bomb.” Truman insisted that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified steps to end the most terrible war in history but he did not want to place such power in the hands of national leaders in any conflict in the future. If Truman’s plans for international control over nuclear weapons had been adopted, the insane nuclear arms race of the last 50 years could have been avoided—and humanity could not have been brought to the brink of annihilation in later confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
That 1948 platform also endorsed Truman’s recognition of the state of Israel and the help he had given to the new Jewish nation to survive during the bloody conflicts in Palestine.
Truman was accused of acting emotionally—succumbing to the pleas of Eddie Jacobson, his former partner in a clothing store, and other Jewish friends—or of pandering to the wealthy American Jews who gave large amounts of money to his candidacy and other nominees of the Democratic Party. But I and others who worked on that 1948 platform knew that the president was genuinely convinced that the Jewish people should have a homeland. His primary motivation came from his reading of the Bible. His religious faith came from the scriptures in that book regarded as holy by Jews and Christians.
Truman was one of the few American leaders who tried to save the Jews from Hitler’s concentration camps. In April 1943, after he learned that Jews had been herded into slaughter houses “like animals,” he voiced his indignation in a fiery speech to 125,000 persons in a Chicago stadium. Saying that “no one can any longer doubt the horrible intentions of the Nazi beasts,” Truman urged all the governments then at war with the Nazis to help the Jews before it was too late. He asked for the opening of “free lands” for the Jews and other persecuted minorities.
If his plea had been heeded, millions of lives could have been saved—including thousands of the most gifted people who ever lived on this planet. It is still impossible to accept the failures of many of the people (including myself) who did little to save the human beings destroyed by the racist Nazis. “Today—not tomorrow—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and a place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers.” He begged all of us to “draw deeply on our traditions of aid to the oppressed—and our great national generosity.” He said: “This is not a Jewish problem, it is an American problem—and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably.”
We did not face it squarely and honorably on the scale that it called for. We did finally join other nations in crushing Hitler’s Nazis and the Japanese warlords. As a member of General Patton’s Third Army, I had the joy of liberating Paris from the German occupation forces in 1944. I must note that it was the humanity of a German general—commander of the Nazi forces in Paris—that kept Paris from being destroyed. Hitler had ordered that general to set the city on fire, but he refused to do it. Hitler died in the wreckage of his bomb shelter in Berlin.
In the years since World War II, there have been many savage events on our planet. The United Nations—created by Truman and other farsighted leaders in 1945—has not been as effective as its founders and supporters hoped that it would be. The destructive forces that have been manifested all through the long history of human beings have produced wars, persecutions of minorities, mass killings, the committing of tortures against international law, have made me wonder whether we will ever evolve into the “glorious beings” we were designed to be.
But we now have an International Bill of Rights drafted by leaders in many countries—and there is a growing awareness of the fundamental value of every person in the developing world culture. President Truman in his inaugural address in 1949 declared that every person is entitled to “a decent, satisfying life.”
The fact that we live in a nuclear age when enough weapons exist to destroy all nations and bring down our whole civilization must awaken in every one of us a sense of personal responsibility for getting rid of those weapons. The leaders of the nuclear powers are not carrying out that vital task. So we the people must demand action to get every government to act for human survival.
The Declaration if Interdependence adopted by this Institute on July 4 thirty years ago indicates the right path for humanity’s future. Let me remind you of the 10 points in that great statement:
(1) To explore the classical and renaissance traditions of East and West—and their continuing relevance to emerging modes and patterns of living;
(2) To renew the universal vision behind the American Dream through authentic affirmations of freedom, excellence and self-transcendence in an ever-evolving Republic of Conscience;
(3) To honor through appropriate observance the contributions of men and women of all ages to world culture;
(4) To enhance the enjoyment of the creative artistry and craftsmanship of all cultures;
(5) To deepen awareness of the universality of humanity’s spiritual striving and its rich varieties of expression in the religions, philosophies and literatures of humanity;
(6) To promote forums for fearless inquiry and constructive dialogue concerning the frontiers of science, the therapeutics of self-transformation, and the societies of the future;
(7) To investigate the imaginative use of the spiritual, mental and material resources of the planet in the service of universal welfare;
(8) To examine changing social structures in terms of the principle that a world culture is greater than the sum of its parts and to envision the conditions, prospects and possibilities of the world civilization of the future;
(9) To assist in the emergence of men and women of universal culture, capable of continuous growth in non-violence of mind, generosity of heart, and harmony of soul. I call these persons “glorious beings”;
(10) To promote universal brotherhood and to foster human fellowship among all races, nations and cultures.
Many of the topics were the subjects of long dialogues I had in the 1950s with Raghavan and Nandini Iyer when I served as vice president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The Iyers—and their brilliant son, Pico—certainly had the qualities of “glorious beings” and I want to express my gratitude for the inspirations they gave to me and to many others, including the founders of this Institute.
In closing, I want to thank all of you who participated in our meeting here tonight. You affirm my belief in the statement of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said: “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end”
We are all rising together in Eternity’s sunrise!
There have not always been wars; and there need not always be wars. Before the onset of civilization, there may have been tribal skirmishes but there was not organized warfare between competing military forces. 