Peace Dividend Spring, Hurrah!!

Tomorrow is MLK Day, and I think I shall take it easy, especially if the ice storm breaks over us here near Port Desespoir. We need another Holiday to memorialize another great moral victory of the 20th century. We are possibly too close to the period of time to appreciate the importance of all that happened in the 20th century. Why do we need another National Holiday, indeed, a World Holiday? We remember the 20th century for its horrors and wars. The history of mankind is so filled with horror and war that the future may not find the 20th century's violence too far ahead of the field of competitors for most destructive era. The great things are the hard things, the good things, the good acts, acts of comity. The USA and the USSR worked together and achieved a reduction in nuclear arms. The USA and the USSR, after facing each other down in the Cold War, decided that nuclear war was too horrible a thing for rational men to contemplate. By the time of Reagan and Gorbachev, both sides were competing to achieve more reductions. There was a brief time when, after the fall of the USSR, it seemed that nuclear arms might actually be eliminated. It was one of the greatest moral achievements of all history. It was Peace Dividend Spring! Those days seem to be long gone as we take little steps into a new worldwide arms race. We need a Holiday to commemorate what the good men and women of the USA and the USSR and the UN in the 20th century achieved. We need to remember. We may not get another chance.

photo: BBC News