“The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn’t possibly use without committing suicide.”

So said fictional character Julian Osborne, played by Fred Astaire in the 1959 film “On The Beach.”

I suppose that, from a distance of 65-plus years, we have to admit that terrible weapons have been a deterrent, so far, to world-ending scenarios.

No one has launched/dropped a WMD (large-scale) since WWII, when America used them twice, vaporizing tens of thousands of non-combatants in order (ostensibly) to put an end to a war that had already killed tens of millions. This mass murder of (primarily) citizens might arguably be said to have prevented millions more deaths. It depends on who we listen to. We can’t argue that the toll on innocent human life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was nothing short of catastrophic, tragic, and horrifying.

That was a moment in history when only we possessed such weapons.

Today, many countries possess terrible weapons.

It is a profoundly sad testament to our depravity that the craft we’ve perfected over the centuries, the one we’ve invested the most in, is murder.

It’s not a Republican thing or a Democrat thing. It’s not exclusive to one nation, race, or creed.

It’s a human problem. A greed and power problem.

We had it when we lived in caves and had no language.

We have it in the age of the drone and the Data Center.

May we, somehow, for the sake of our children and our children’s children, one day discover that we can believe different things yet have common goals. We can be incredibly diverse yet recognize our fundamental sameness.

Our common humanity and mortality should unify us. But they mostly don’t.

It is one person wanting to have power over another that is at the center of our depravity, NOT the color of our skin or the way we honor what is sacred. It’s the drive to dominate the world and seize its resources to benefit the one with the most might, NOT one side being evil and the other good.

This feels like a particularly scary moment.

So did 9-11. So did Pearl Harbor.

And yet we didn’t annihilate ourselves.

I pray for a future that has eluded our species to this point.

May wisdom and humanity prevail in the decisions made today by those in power through out the world.

–One Ordinary World Citizen, 03-01-2026