What You Allow Will Continue

What you allow will continue.
~Katherine Fugate

Today, I appeared on a podcast sponsored by Voices for a Nuclear Free World, and was asked about the issue of nuclear weapons, their proliferation and what we--as global citizens, can do to end this madness and eliminate the 3720 deployed warheads, and 9680 stored and reserved warheads, housed by 9 countries? The estimated cost for this madness? In 2019, the cost amounted to a total expenditure of $138,699 every minute. An additional $1.98 trillion U.S. dollars are spent by the world for armament. As I mentioned a month ago, the symbolic Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, has been advanced to 100 seconds to midnight to indicate that the threat of a nuclear war through accident, miscalculation or intent has risen to an alarming level, and that climate change is not being averted. This sobering reality is multiplied by the on-going pandemic and the unprecedented 80 million people around the world forced to flee their homes as refugees. A quarter of a billion people worldwide live outside their country of origin. How are these issues connected and what can be done to curtail them? Consider the economic crisis in Russia, the starvation problem occurring in North Korea, the fact that refugee asylum centers are being created instead of people being accepted as immigrants to a country. This list can go on and on.

The illustration above is by Polish born artist, Pawel Kuczynski, who captures reality in satire. His work forces us, in a most curious way, to stop and consider the consequences of our actions and the credence we give to political decisions. There are two potential answers to the problems we face in our global community: education and dialogue, both with compassion at the core. The solution to the problem of the escalation of spending on weapons, and not on people, will take decades and many of us will not be around to see the results. Therefore, we have no choice but to inform ourselves of the facts, begin kitchen table/living room conversations with our neighbors and families about what we can do locally to impact national decisions. We must make our political representatives aware of our movements. A daily phone call or email to elected local politicians, no matter their and our political affiliation is essential. Asking for our religious leaders to use the pulpit to educate us and encourage us to have difficult conversations is a necessity. Organizing, marching, and using our voices to increase the attention to issues that affect children and youth, and their futures is needed. Talking up social emotional learning and compassionate education for students, like those programs endorsed by the Charter for Compassion, Think Equal, SEE Learning, Compassionate Integrity Training, and Charter for Compassionate Schools is also a necessity. We are at the tipping point and our destiny can go in a different direction, let's make certain we take the right path. The Charter's programs, such as the Global Read, and courses, especially such as How to Build Resilience in a Polarized World, are planned to offer hope, help with stress relief, and promote peace. Please, join us.

with warm regards,

Marilyn 

This message from Marilyn Turkovich, Executive Director of the Charter for Compassion, appears in our 06/20/2021 weekly newsletter. To sign up for our newsletter, scroll all the way down to the end of this page to get to the bottom menu, in the newsletter section enter your email address and click on subscribe.