A World Awaited And Attained, 2021 Edition

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-12-31 16:00:00-05:00 No comments

I first posted this in January 2017. I post it again today. The world awaited is not yet the world attained, but the fighting spirit burns on. Spero meliora.

"Fear produceth cruelty, the companion of cowardice." This was the secret of fascist barbarity, and it remains the secret of similar ghastly enterprises still observable in the world. Cruelty is a contagion spread from dying tyrannies, great or small, which endeavor, as they vanish, to make everything vanish with them. The fear from which it issues is the fear of losing power, and the cowardice which is its companion is timidity before a better world. Men who seek by cruelty to continue in the old way are men afraid to try a new.

But we, if we are to fear anything, ought rather to fear the old ways, the old intolerances and crimes, the old myths which once obscured our vision. We are cast upon the future without reluctance and even without regret, as finding there the substance of desire. If the present rulers of earth can be persuade into peace and fraternity, we shall do all we can to bring them thither. But if they continue to offer us nothing but tears, then we, the peoples of the world, must take the world and mold it to our wish. Either way, we shall come much nearer than before to that securer condition of man in which, by common control of our entire social destiny, we liberate all talents and energies, cast out all barrier of unequal privilege, and show ourselves at last a present and enduring brotherhood.

Now, therefore, since the struggle deepens, since evil abides and good does not yet prosper, let us gather what strength we have, what confidence and valor, that our small victories may end in triumph, and the world awaited be a world attained.

-- Barrows Dunham, Man Against Myth, 1947