The president of the United Nations stated at COP31 in Antalya today that
“You cannot build peace on a burning planet”.
In saying this he is echoing and reinforcing the wise words at the beginning of Section 13 of the Treaty Of Versailles (1919), which was the treaty that brought to an official end “the war to end all wars”.
“Recognising that there can be no lasting peace without social justice…”
Looking at our collective behaviours since that time, it seems that a war has been waged that has tried to establish which ideological model is the most successful at monetising ‘social justice’ for the benefit of a minority.
It seems a good time to re-post a poem of hope and inspiration, written by Petra Kelly while she was at school in the United States in 1966. This was before she worked as a staffer on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and long before she helped to found the Greens.
Born in Germany in 1947 as Petra Karin Lehmann, she took her US step-father’s surname when she moved to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Kelly
IN DEFENSE OF MY GENERATION – Petra Karin Kelly (1966)
This poem itself will soon leave your mind,
Like most modern rhyme you will let it die;
But yet I utter in hope to seek and find
Someone to ascend with me in search of the sky
Oh, those who are my probing generation,
We are more than a preface or a step
Into hopes, anxieties and hesitations.
We are a threshold and a payer of debts…
We foresee no final peace nor Utopia can we make
The masters of war despite us will be born.
If only some pessimism we can forsake,
Hope can ripen and chagrin be forlorn.
Now we seek with arms outspread
To embrace the world for which we yearn.
To ferret virtues from the vices we met
And merge soul and mind in order to learn.
Already our minds reflect on the true and the false.
We fight maturely beside the mature on the front lines.
Upheavals of mankind and the challenge of living calls
For us to constantly illuminate what no longer shines.
Will we as adults be caught in a web of apathy
Thinking of each tomorrow as a new today?
Rising like robots, controlled by conformity –
The daily fibre of living, in pattern-obsessed ways? …
And how much will it be worth to win
To reach the moon, the top, letting success call,
To fill the bucket of materialism to the brim
And discover you can’t take it with you after all? . . .
The firmament watches as the sphere speedily turns.
You and I must improve whatever we are and see
And confess in harmony to an inquiry of utmost concern,
‘What would this world be like if all were like me?’
Shun mediocrity! We all can be great.
Potential of greatness lies untapped
In all of us.
We all can reach OUR unreachable start.
Explore our reasons for being a midget, a giant
But dare not compare and compete in size.
We have our self and there alone
Lies greatness …
With all the forces in the century
There is one we cannot equate
And that is the power of love.
It can generate to change this human clan of 1966, and leave it glorified.