In the beginning was the word. OK. This is the beginning, and these are the words, but they haven't arrived yet - at least not officially, with full force of meaning.
It's our job, not God's, to create the new story of who we are, and millions - billions - of people fervently wish we could do so. The problem is that the worst of our nature is better organized than the best of it.
The words constitute Article 1 of the U.N.'s draft declaration on peace. What alerts me that they matter is the fact that they're controversial, that "there is a lack of consensus" among the member states, according to the president of the Human Rights Council, "about the concept of the right to peace as a right in itself."
David Adams, former UNESCO senior program specialist, describes the controversy with a little more candor in his 2009 book, World Peace through the Town Hall:
"At the United Nations in 1999, there was a remarkable moment when the draft culture of peace resolution that we had prepared at UNESCO was considered during informal sessions. The original draft had mentioned a 'human right to peace.' According to the notes taken by the UNESCO observer, 'the U.S. delegate said that peace should not be elevated to the category of human right, otherwise it will be very difficult to start a war.' The observer was so astonished that she asked the U.S. delegate to repeat his remark. 'Yes,' he said, 'peace should not be elevated to the category of human right, otherwise it will be very difficult to start a war.'"And a remarkable truth emerges, one it's not polite to talk about or allude to in the context of national business: In one way or another, war rules. Elections come and go, even our enemies come and go, but war rules. This fact is not subject to debate or, good Lord, democratic tinkering. Nor is the need for and value of war - or its endless, self-perpetuating mutation - ever pondered with clear-eyed astonishment in the mass media. We never ask ourselves, in a national context: What would it mean if living in peace were a human right?
Comment: With kidnapped girls and ebola and the continuing violence, what makes Nigeria so interesting? Could it be its large oil reserves and that it is the world's 21st largest economy with a low debt-to-GDP ratio?