History Is Screaming

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/20-2

History Is Screaming

by Robert C. Koehler


Nobody opines sagely anymore that the races will never get along, calmly ladling conventional certainties over the earnest idealism of civil-rights activists. But we live in a world so permeated with militarized fear of demagogic leaders and rogue states that nuclear deterrence retains enough of the default credibility it had during the Cold War, as the opposite of utopian naïveté, that common sense is still on the defensive.

No matter that some of the most prominent old Cold Warriors have lost their faith in nuclear weapons, and grasp that us vs. them security concepts are disastrously counterproductive in today's more complex, more nationally porous global reality, and have downgraded that era's most notorious acronym — M.A.D., as in Mutually Assured Destruction — to just plain mad.

"U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage . . ."

Let` those words reverberate, as we ponder their seriousness: ". . . to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons . . . and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world. . . . (which) is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era."

They were written, in early 2007, by two former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz; a former secretary of defense, William Perry; and former Sen. Sam Nunn, long-time chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. All are ex-hawks, stalwart defenders of the Free World back in the day, but here they are speaking in humbler language, language that is plaintive and almost prayer-like, of "a world free" — of nuclear weapons.

snip//

Only someone currently in full possession of the blessings and curses of power can give this vision the credibility of inevitability, which brings me to my point: We have just elected such a person president, and, as the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg put it, "there is already the feel of the beginning of a new era." The prevailing fabric of political cynicism has a gash from top to bottom, and a global yearning for change rushes in.

Why else are a million and a half people expected to pack the D.C. mall for Barack Obama's inauguration? Scalpers are selling tickets to the event for as high $60,000. History is screaming. Surely it is a cry for international cooperation, a safer world, a new way of thinking. Surely it is a cry that we step away from the madness of our nuclear suicide pact.

But only the man of the moment can give this cry political traction. Obama needs more than our cheers. He needs our ultimatum as well: our insistence that he step into the future we voted for.

[midnight]

1. Wow. Scalpers are selling tickets to the event for as high $60,000.

I know there are alot of events going on, with different balls, and parties, but what will this price tag for 60,000. purchase for the ticket holder?

[babylonsister]

2. No clue. I thought Feinstein made it clear these events were

being held for Americans and there shouldn't be a price attached to them. :shrug: