Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: youth empowerment

  • We Call BS

    This speech was delivered at a rally on February 17, 2018, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

    We haven’t already had a moment of silence in the House of Representatives, so I would like to have another one. Thank you.

    Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.

    We certainly do not understand why it should be harder to make plans with friends on weekends than to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon. In Florida, to buy a gun you do not need a permit, you do not need a gun license, and once you buy it you do not need to register it. You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun. You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.

    I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student’s right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.

    Instead of worrying about our AP Gov chapter 16 test, we have to be studying our notes to make sure that our arguments based on politics and political history are watertight. The students at this school have been having debates on guns for what feels like our entire lives. AP Gov had about three debates this year. Some discussions on the subject even occurred during the shooting while students were hiding in the closets. The people involved right now, those who were there, those posting, those tweeting, those doing interviews and talking to people, are being listened to for what feels like the very first time on this topic that has come up over 1,000 times in the past four years alone.

    I found out today there’s a website shootingtracker.com. Nothing in the title suggests that it is exclusively tracking the USA’s shootings and yet does it need to address that? Because Australia had one mass shooting in 1999 in Port Arthur (and after the) massacre introduced gun safety, and it hasn’t had one since. Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are, with websites dedicated to reporting these tragedies so that they can be formulated into statistics for your convenience.

    I watched an interview this morning and noticed that one of the questions was, do you think your children will have to go through other school shooter drills? And our response is that our neighbors will not have to go through other school shooter drills. When we’ve had our say with the government — and maybe the adults have gotten used to saying ‘it is what it is,’ but if us students have learned anything, it’s that if you don’t study, you will fail. And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it’s time to start doing something.

    We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we’re going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because, just as David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting. Just like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That’s going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook and it’s going to be due to the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members and most of all the students. The students who are dead, the students still in the hospital, the student now suffering PTSD, the students who had panic attacks during the vigil because the helicopters would not leave us alone, hovering over the school for 24 hours a day.

    There is one tweet I would like to call attention to. “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities again and again.” We did, time and time again. Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him, you didn’t know this kid. OK, we did. We know that they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue. He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.

    And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the student’s fault, the fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn’t take them away from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies, and I am not talking about the FBI. I’m talking about the people he lived with. I’m talking about the neighbors who saw him outside holding guns.

    If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.

    You want to know something? It doesn’t matter, because I already know. Thirty million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don’t do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you.

    To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.

    If your money was as threatened as us, would your first thought be, how is this going to reflect on my campaign? Which should I choose? Or would you choose us, and if you answered us, will you act like it for once? You know what would be a good way to act like it? I have an example of how to not act like it. In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.

    From the interactions that I had with the shooter before the shooting and from the information that I currently know about him, I don’t really know if he was mentally ill. I wrote this before I heard what Delaney said. Delaney said he was diagnosed. I don’t need a psychologist and I don’t need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really dumb idea.

    Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill and now he’s stating for the record, “Well, it’s a shame the FBI isn’t doing background checks on these mentally ill people.” Well, duh. You took that opportunity away last year.

    The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice to call BS. Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.

    If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.

  • Youth Program on the Humanitarian Dimensions of Nuclear Disarmament

    In early September 2012, with the generous support of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, students from Austria, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Switzerland, Iran, Italy, Palestine, and Romania participated in the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Youth Program on the Humanitarian Dimensions of Nuclear Disarmament. These students met with members of civil society and representatives from different states. They further participated in a seminar on the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament and an informational workshop about the Ban All Nukes Generation’s tentative program, entitled “Claim your voice. Ban the Bomb,” a youth empowerment program that will be held during the conference in Oslo.


    Prior to the program, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation established an international coordinating group for this program. This international coordinating group assembled a background document, which contained references to reports from NGOs and statements by states, including Switzerland, about the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament.


    Participants in the humanitarian program


    When the students arrived to Geneva on September 4, 2012, they participated in a roundtable discussion with members of the NGO Committee for Disarmament, a substantive committee of the Conference of NGOs with Consultative relationship with the United Nations Committee, that is composed of Reaching Critical Will, International Peace Bureau, Mayors for Peace, World Council of Churches, Soka Gakkai International (SGI), Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. During this meeting, participants asked the members of the NGO Committee about the international disarmament machinery, the role of religious organizations in promoting nuclear disarmament, and the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament.


    After the roundtable discussion with members of the NGO Committee for Disarmament, Mr. Christian N. Ciobanu distributed information about different states’ views on nuclear disarmament to the students. He also underscored the importance of the Swiss joint statement on the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament to the participants.


    Once the participants received an adequate background on the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament, the participants met with representatives from Non-Nuclear Weapon States. Most of these representatives explained to them why their governments either supported or did not support the joint statement on the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament.


    In the afternoon of September 5, the participants attended the NGO Committee for Disarmament’s Seminar on the Humanitarian Dimensions of Nuclear Disarmament in which Mr. Colin Archer, the Secretary-General of the International Peace Bureau served as the moderator. During this seminar, the participants heard statements from Mr. Peter Herby, head of the legal division of the International Committee of the Red Cross; Dr. Daniel Plesch, Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies’ Center for International Studies and Diplomacy (CISD); Mr. Magnus Lovold, a representative of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN); and Mr. Christian N. Ciobanu, Geneva Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Finally, based on the feedback from the participants, they enjoyed Lovold and Ciobanu’s views on how the humanitarian disarmament process can help raise awareness about the need for the international community to support a nuclear weapons convention and the devastating environmental impacts of nuclear weapons.


    On September 6, the final day of the program, the Ban All Nukes Generation convened an informational workshop about the “Claim your voice. Ban the Bomb.” In addition, as part of the workshop, the representatives of Ban All Nukes Generation underscored the need for young people to become empowered citizens and attend the program in Oslo in March 2013. The program would also tentatively give young European people an opportunity to make an impact at the conference in Oslo. Specifically, it will provide them with the methodological tools they need to become actively involved at the local, national and European levels to resolve both the global political and environmental impacts of nuclear weapons.

  • Report on the NGO Committee for Disarmament Seminar

    On September 5, 2012, with the generous support of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the NGO Committee for Disarmament convened the “Seminar on the Humanitarian Dimensions of Nuclear Disarmament” at the Palais des Nations in which Mr. Colin Archer, Secretary-General of the International Peace Bureau, served as the moderator. 


    During the seminar, Mr. Peter Herby, Head of the International Committee of the Red Cross` Mines-Arms Unit; Dr. Daniel Plesch, Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies` Center for International Studies and Diplomacy (CISD); Mr. Magnus Lovold, a representative of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN); and Mr. Christian N. Ciobanu, Geneva Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, provided important perspectives about the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament to students, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Non-Nuclear Weapon States, Nuclear Weapon States, and officials from the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.


    The following is a brief description of what each speaker discussed at the seminar.


    Peter Herby


    Mr. Herby explained the bombings of Hiroshima caused thousands of civilian deaths, including 270 doctors, 16 nurses, and 112 pharmacists in Hiroshima. He also described the devastating health effects of nuclear weapons on the hibakusha, such as the ionizing effects of Uranium-235 and genetic complications caused by the highly enriched Uranium-235. These effects prompted the ICRC to publicly vocalize its position in favor of nuclear disarmament in late 1945.


    Mr. Herby further touched upon the three core principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), including the principle of distinctions between civilians and combatants, the principle of proportionality, and the principle of precaution of attack. He further elaborated upon the International Court of Justice’s 1996 Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons.  Finally, he touched upon the ICRC’s decision to affirm its position on nuclear disarmament in 2011.


    Daniel Plesch


    Dr. Plesch provided a concise historical overview of the evolution of International Humanitarian Law to the participants of the seminar. He described how the results of the Nuremberg Trials and the Commission of the Universal Declaration established the basis of IHL. He further discussed the international community’s views on IHL during the period of the Cold War.  Finally, he elaborated upon the ICJ’s 1996 Advisory Opinion and the Nuclear Weapons States’ nuclear deterrence doctrines to illustrate how the Nuclear Weapon States are violating IHL by investing in and modernizing their nuclear arsenals.


    Dr. Plesch also mentioned that the international community should engage in discussions on disarmament within the context of the Open Skies Agreement as illustrated in CISD’s Strategic Concept for Removal of Arms and Proliferation. This process will help the international community to evaluate disarmament within a new context.


    As part of his concluding remarks, Dr. Plesch suggested that the international community should develop a framework, which would be similar to the Iraqi Weapons Inspection Regime, to pressure the Nuclear Weapon States to dismantle their nuclear weapons.


    Magnus Lovold


    As a representative of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), Mr. Magnus Lovold explained that “the humanitarian aspects of nuclear disarmament provide an opportunity to take the issue down from the high shelves of international security, and turn it into something that everyone can understand.” Moreover, he argued that the humanitarian approach enables key actors in the disarmament movement to form linkages between the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament and other humanitarian disarmament processes, including the process leading to the treaty banning landmines and the treaty banning cluster bombs. Finally, by forming linkages between different disarmament processes, ICAN can form the necessary relationships with new organizations to encourage the international community to agree to a treaty that bans nuclear weapons.


    Christian N. Ciobanu


    Mr. Ciobanu, Geneva Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said that states must support the humanitarian dimensions of nuclear disarmament to avoid the possibility of a nuclear war that would directly contribute to a nuclear famine in the world. He remarked that a nuclear war anywhere in the world, using as few as 100 weapons, would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production so severely that the lives of more than a billion people would be at risk. Finally, he contended that leading atmospheric scientists warned that the effects of a regional war between neighboring states could cause nuclear famine.


    To illustrate his point that a regional war between neighboring states can contribute to nuclear famine, Mr. Ciobanu described that scientists modeled a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities. He noted that smoke from the burning cities would rise into the stratosphere, where it would reduce sunlight for up to ten years, dropping temperatures on Earth to the lowest levels in the past 1,000 years and shortening growing seasons across the planet. The result would be crop failures and a nuclear famine, which could result in the deaths of hundreds of millions to a billion people globally.


    Mr. Ciobanu underscored that states should support Article 51 and Article 54 of the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Convention. Finally, he emphasized that states must support the principles of IHL and produce tangible political results to create a world that is free of nuclear weapons.

  • A Message to Youth: Live to Your Full Capacity and Save the Planet

    This speech was delivered to the youth of Soka Gakkai International in Japan on February 8, 2010.

    I want to talk with you as youth, as a group of youth who care about our world.  One thing is certain: You will inherit the world.  It will not be either the strong or the meek who will inherit the Earth; for better or for worse, it will be the youth.  You will inherit what we, the older generation, leave to you, and you will hopefully do better than we have done in preserving this beautiful planet and the diversity of its life forms.  You will hopefully do better in achieving and maintaining peace on our planet.  You will also have the eventual responsibility, as each generation does, to pass the world on in tact to the next generation.  

    New generations of youth keep coming, like waves against the shore.  Now it is your turn to reach the shore.  As animals once left the sea for the land, you now come of age to take responsibility in the world.  And you come of age at a time of great challenge.  The generations of your parents and grandparents have left you a world that is fraught with dangers and inequities.  The test of your generation will be in the way you create a more just and decent world.  But you will have another challenge as well.  You will have to navigate the dangers of nuclear weapons – weapons capable of ending civilization and destroying most life on Earth.

    The human future is not guaranteed.  That is the most profound meaning of the Nuclear Age.  It is an era in which we have created weapons that are capable of omnicide, the destruction of all.  Omnicide is an extension of suicide and genocide to the entire world.  We live in a time when it is possible to destroy everything.  We have proven our cleverness in creating tools of destruction.  Now it is up to us, and to you as youth in particular, to find the means to assure that these tools are not used and are abolished.

    How will you do this?  To start with, you must recognize the nature of the problem.  This is no ordinary problem that can be left to work itself out.  It requires a plan.  Who will create and implement such a plan?  Who will take the lead in assuring that we are progressing toward zero nuclear weapons?  The problem could become much worse than it is today.  Instead of nine nuclear weapon states, imagine a world in which there are 20 or 50 or 100.  What kind of world would that be?  

    We have a Non-Proliferation Treaty that seeks to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons.  That treaty has a provision for nuclear disarmament, so that there will not be permanent classes of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.”  Everyone recognizes that such a world would not be fair, so Article VI of the treaty requires that the nuclear weapon states engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament.  The International Court of Justice interpreted this clause in its 1996 Advisory Opinion on the illegality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons.  They said, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

    I would like to share with you some additional reasons to abolish nuclear weapons:

    1. They are long-distance killing machines incapable of discriminating between soldiers and civilians, the aged and the newly born, or between men, women and children.   As such, they are instruments of dehumanization as well as annihilation.

    2. They threaten the destruction of cities, countries and civilization; of all that is sacred, of all that is human, of all that exists.  Nuclear war could cause deadly climate change, putting human existence at risk.  Here is what one researcher, Steven Starr, concluded from reviewing the recent literature on nuclear weapons and climate change: “The detonation of a tiny fraction of the operational nuclear arsenals within cities would generate enough smoke to cause catastrophic disruptions of the global climate and massive destruction of the protective stratospheric ozone layer.  Environmental devastation caused by a war fought with many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons would quickly leave the Earth uninhabitable.”

    3. They threaten to foreclose the future, negating our common responsibility to future generations.

    4. They make cowards of their possessors, and in their use there can be no decency or honor.  This was recognized by most of the leading US generals and admirals of World War II, including Dwight Eisenhower, Hap Arnold, Omar Bradley, and William Leahy.  Admiral Leahy, chief of staff to President Truman, said: “The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

    5. They divide the world’s nations into nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” bestowing false and unwarranted prestige and privilege on those that possess them.  

    6. They are a distortion of science and technology, siphoning off our scientific and technological resources and twisting our knowledge of nature to destructive purposes.  On the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a senior Manhattan Project scientist, Hans Bethe, called upon “…all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons – and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.”  

    7. They mock international law, displacing it with an allegiance to raw power.  The International Court of Justice has ruled that the threat of use of nuclear weapons is generally illegal and any use that violated international humanitarian law would be illegal.  It is virtually impossible to imagine a threat or use of nuclear weapons that would not violate international humanitarian law by failing to discriminate between soldiers and civilians, causing unnecessary suffering or being disproportionate to a preceding attack.  

    8. They waste our resources on the development of instruments of annihilation.  The United States alone has spent over $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems since the onset of the Nuclear Age.

    9. They concentrate power in the hands of a small group of individuals and, in doing so, undermine democracy.  They give over to a few individuals, usually men, greater power of annihilation than at any previous time in history.

    10. They are morally abhorrent, as recognized by virtually every religious organization, and their mere existence corrupts our humanity.  If we are willing to tolerate these weapons and their indiscriminate power of annihilation, then who are we?  What do these weapons say about our humanity, our human decency?

    I think it should be clear that one primary goal for youth should be to act and to lead in abolishing nuclear weapons.  

    Later this year, in May, there will be an eighth Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.  This is the only treaty that has provisions requiring the nuclear weapon states to pursue the goal of nuclear disarmament.  It will be an important meeting after the failure of the last NPT Review Conference in 2005.  To give you an idea of how much there is to accomplish, I want to share with you the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s priority recommendations for the conference:

    1. Each signatory nuclear weapon state should provide an accurate public accounting of its nuclear arsenal, conduct a public environmental and human assessment of its potential use, and devise and make public a roadmap for going to zero nuclear weapons.

    2. All signatory nuclear weapon states should reduce the role of nuclear weapons in their security policies by taking all nuclear forces off high-alert status, pledging No First Use of nuclear weapons against other nuclear weapon states and No Use against non-nuclear weapon states.

    3. All enriched uranium and reprocessed plutonium – military and civilian – and their production facilities (including all uranium enrichment and plutonium separation technology) should be placed under strict and effective international safeguards.

    4. All signatory states should review Article IV of the NPT, promoting the “inalienable right” to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, in light of the nuclear proliferation problems posed by nuclear electricity generation.

    5. Each nuclear weapon state should comply with Article VI of the NPT, reinforced and clarified by the 1996 World Court Advisory Opinion, by commencing negotiations in good faith on a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons, and complete these negotiations by the year 2015.

    The problems may seem complex, but the bottom line is this: Nuclear weapons threaten the human future, and they must be abolished.  This is a human issue that is every bit as consequential as was the movement to abolish slavery in the 19th century.  There are some acts that cannot be tolerated, and slavery and the threat of nuclear omnicide are among them.

    You can be a voice for abolition by learning more, supporting the hibakusha, and speaking out for a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons.  Don’t be satisfied with anything less than a clear commitment to a world with zero nuclear weapons, and demand more from political leaders who say that the goal is too difficult or cannot be achieved within their lifetime.  

    In addition to working for the abolition of nuclear weapons, your generation faces many other challenges as well.  There is no major international problem in our world that does not require international cooperation to solve.  Thus, we need to work together.  With modern communications and transportation, your generation is well equipped to cooperate across all borders.  Really, borders exist primarily in our minds.  They are not drawn upon the Earth, only on maps.  And all borders are permeable to ideas and trade, as well as to pollution and disease.  The bottom line is that we live in a single unitary world.  We all share one Earth, and we can make of it a paradise or a nightmare.  We choose – by our actions or inaction.    

    We live in a world of some 200 nation states.  Most of these spend far too much on their military forces, so that in total the world spends some $1.5 trillion a year on its militaries.  We know that for a relatively small proportion of this amount – five or ten percent – it would be possible to make enormous progress on the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals.  These goals include ending poverty and hunger, universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development.  The achievement of these goals would reflect real advances in human security, and with relatively small reductions in global military expenditures we could make them happen.

    As you go through life, you will have many challenges.  Each of you will have to find your own way in the world.  I want to share with you 12 ideas on how to meet these challenges.  These involve using all your miraculous gifts to live to your full capacity as human beings.

    1.    Learn from others, but think for yourself.  (Use your mind and judgment.)

    2.    Decide for yourself what is right or wrong.  (Use your conscience.)

    3.    Speak out for what you believe in.  (Use your voice.)

    4.    Stand up for what is right. (Use your power as an individual.)

    5.    Set goals and be persistent in working for them.  (Use your vision and determination.)

    6.    Live by the Golden Rule.  That is, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  (Use your feelings as a point of reference.)

    7.    Recognize the miracle that you are.  You are unique in the universe.  (Be spiritually aware.)

    8.    Never harm another miracle.  Choose to solve conflicts without resort to violence.  (Be nonviolent.)

    9.    Believe in yourself.  (Be trustworthy, even to yourself.)

    10.    Help others.  (Be giving.)

    11.    Be a citizen of the world.  (Be inclusive and embrace all life.)

    12.    Be a force for peace and justice.  (Be courageous and committed.)

    I hope you will find joy in life and also contribute to creating a more just and decent world.  If you care about life and recognize its preciousness, you are needed to create a better future.  Albert Camus, the great French writer and philosopher, said: “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

    Camus responded to the first atomic bombing in this way: “Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only battle worth waging. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments – a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.”  I stand with Albert Camus in choosing to wage peace.  I hope you will as well.

    As you may know, I engaged in a dialogue with SGI President Daisaku Ikeda.  We espoused the principle of choosing hope, rather than succumbing to ignorance, apathy or despair.  Hope gives rise to action, and action, in turn, gives rise to hope.  Our shared hope includes the goal of building a more peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons – a daunting but essential goal.  I stand with Daisaku Ikeda in choosing hope.  I’m sure that you stand with him as well.

    You are the future.  May each of you choose hope, wage peace, and live your lives fully and with a full measure of joy.  I wish you all much success.

    Let me conclude with a poem that I wrote for a Soka High School graduation some years ago.  I think its message remains valid today.

    ADVICE TO GRADUATES

    Always remember this:
    You are a miracle
    Made up of dancing atoms
    That can talk and sing,
    Listen and remember, and laugh,
    At times even at yourself.

    You are a miracle
    Whose atoms existed before time.
    Born of the Big Bang, you are connected
    To everything – to mountains and oceans,
    To the winds and wilderness, to the creatures
    Of the sea and air and land.
    You are a member of the human family.

    You are a miracle, entirely unique.
    There has never been another
    With your combination of talents, dreams,
    Desires and hopes.  You can create.
    You are capable of love and compassion.

    You are a miracle.
    You are a gift of creation to itself.
    You are here for a purpose, which you must find.
    Your presence here is sacred – and you will
    Change the world.