Peace In Our Time

"Fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges."
"While history tells us that these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executed." "While freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on Earth."
"No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people."
U.S. President Barack Obama, Second-term Inaugural Speech

Soaring, inspirational rhetoric, to great enthusiastic applause. Americans have their noble Nobel Laureate for peace. But the world is anything but peaceful. Despite which their president called on his America to shun "perpetual war", to look instead with favour on the peacemakers, to be granted dominance in the theatre of conflict globally.

It was, after all, previous presidents who have led their country into a succession of wars, based then largely on ideology, all of which cost that great country greatly in terms of human lives, their own and those of other combatants, and state treasury which might have been used in other ways, to improve state institutions and the lives of those dependent on them.

But the thing of it is, engagement in far-off wars was always seen to be required for the advancement of the American agenda. Which included of course, arms technology and sales, for nothing seems to bolster an economy like a good old-fashioned war. It is the new-fangled wars like those fought by non-traditional adversaries like al-Qaeda and the Taliban that drains a state's treasury.

The country's reliance on foreign-derived energy sources was a compelling enough reason to go to war. While at the same time self-righteously declaiming a secondary but inflated imperative, to expand democracy across the Globe. While for a time being the war-going succeeded in protecting energy sources, the democratic quotient that did surface bore little resemblance to the familiar.

Ideas and language that complements those noble high-flown ideas come readily to the lips of those who claim to have a vision. Capitalizing neatly on the visions of their predecessors, coasting to the victory of achieving what was so searingly sought out of the pain of humiliation and misery. But this is human nature and it does speak compellingly of our better natures struggling with our inner selves.

"No one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation. We must be a source of hope to the poor, the stick, the marginalized, the victims of a crisis, not out of mere charity but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice."

Truly inspired. But for the unfortunate adoption of the "peace in our time" playback to an earlier era when that declaration heralded a world turmoil of deadly proportions.