DEAR EDITOR:

No doubt this slice of national and world history we are experiencing now resembles those of the past. As Dean Koontz described it in one of his novels, “In spite of the towering cities and…the science-fiction technology made real, the moment is fragile, the foundation undermined.”

With all the wisdom and science imparted upon us in the 20th Century, why are we at this crossroads again?

Dr. Carl Sagan wrote, “From Gettysburg to the blockbuster bombs of WW II, a thousand times more explosive energy; from the blockbuster to the atomic bomb, a thousand times more; and from the atomic bomb to the hydrogen bomb a thousand times still more. A thousand times a thousand, times a thousand is a billion; in less than one century, our most fearful weapon has become a billion times more deadly. But, again, we have not become a billion times wiser in the generations that stretch from Gettysburg to us.”

In his book ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,’ R. Buckminster Fuller wrote, “If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmically bankrupt” and “We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we ought to be doing to forestall warring.”

General and President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Decades before them, in the Final Speech from The Great Dictator, in his first film with dialogue, Charlie Chaplin said, “In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.”

Fuller asked, “Why do aggressive political leaders who share the controls of Spaceship Earth have us darting backward, forward and around in circles, getting nowhere?”

And, lastly, Carl Sagan wrote this: “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

Regrettably, thanks to some narrow-minded people, their foreign policy “projects” and flip-flopping “no new wars” atrocity propaganda, history just repeated itself.

KIM R. KOTHEIMER

Poland