http://thisibelieve.org A public dialogue about belief — one essay at a time Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:20:02 +0000 en hourly 1 People from all walks of life describe their personal philosophies in a brief essay. This I Believe, Inc. clean This I Believe, Inc. wp@thisibelieve.com wp@thisibelieve.com (This I Believe, Inc.) This I Believe, Inc. A public dialogue about belief—one essay at a time believe,belief,murrow,npr,beleive,beleif,bob,edwards,featured,essay,history,philosophy http://thisibelieve.org/images/TIB-logo-rss.jpg http://thisibelieve.org http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23042/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23042/#comments Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23042/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23042/feed/ 0 faith & religion,family,values & spirituality As a hospital chaplain, parent and writer, Susan Cosio often finds her life filled with responsibilities and distractions. But she believes the quiet time of a daily walk helps her stay connected to God. Sometimes I feel like I have no real sense of direction. At 45, this is a little scary. I think my distraction is due to the variety of roles I play and my tendency to try to please others. Much of my day is spent responding to requests: "Mommy, will you..." "Susan, can you..." My world is full of spoken and unspoken expectations that I try to live up to as a parent, as a person, as a friend. I believe I have to remove myself from the voices that barrage me in order to find my true compass. This includes a daily walk just to listen. The guiding light of my life is the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit. In our hectic, noisy world, I have to slow down or withdraw in order to hear it. Prayer, I have discovered, is less about what I say and more about what I hear. Time set apart with God is like a hike to a peak from the middle of a dense forest; it gives me perspective and some ability to see where I've been and where I am going. Discerning God's voice is not so hard when I make time to listen closely. Sometimes I hear it as a sudden insight when I step back from a situation. Other times, it's a deep sense of my priorities or a conviction about something I should do or say. I often take a walk with a pencil and notepad in my pocket, and return with notes for a speech or piece of writing. Later, when someone tells me she was moved by the words I'd scribbled on that paper, I know my prompting came from God. My pursuit of spiritual truth is not about religion as much as it is about relationship. It is not about intellectualizing God's commands, but about internalizing his truth within my heart as well as my head — an understanding so deep and intimate that it affects not only my thinking, but my behavior as well. On my daily walks, I've recognized how to parent my children through difficult situations, been prompted to call a friend I hadn't heard from in a while, and felt compelled to reach out to strangers who soon became my friends. I believe in a daily walk to listen because that is when I am close to God; that is when I find my way. I am most at peace when I tune out the voices of the world long enough to hear the still, small voice of God directing me. "Be still," Psalm 46 reminds me, "and know that I am God." This I Believe, Inc. clean 23042 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16492/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16492/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16492/ Read a new essay Deutsch wrote in 2005.)]]> http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16492/feed/ 0 faith & religion,purpose,question At 16, Elizabeth Deutsch was the youngest essayist to appear on Edward R. Murrow’s This I Believe. She discusses her search for philosophical and spiritual beliefs that can guide her as an adult. (Read a new essay Deutsch wrote in 2005.) At the age of sixteen, many of my friends have already chosen a religion to follow (usually that of their parents), and are bound to it by many ties. I am still “free-lancing” in religion, searching for beliefs to guide me when I am an adult. I fear I shall always be searching, never attaining ultimate satisfaction, for I possess that blessing and curse—a doubting, questioning mind. At present, my doubting spirit has found comfort in certain ideas, gleaned from books and experience, to form a personal philosophy. I find that this philosophy—a code consisting of a few phrases—supplements, but does not replace, religion. The one rule that could serve anyone in almost any situation is, “To see what must be done and not to do it, is a crime.” Urged on by this, I volunteer for distasteful tasks or pick up scrap paper from the floor. I am no longer able to ignore duty without feeling guilty. This is “the still, small voice,” to be sure, but sharpened by my own discernment of duty. “The difficult we do at once, the impossible takes a little longer.” This is the motto of a potential scientist, already struggling to unravel the mysteries of life. It rings with the optimism youth needs in order to stand up against trouble or failure. Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan minister, resolved never to do anything out of revenge. I am a modern, a member of a church far removed from Puritanism, yet I have accepted this resolution. Since revenge and retaliation seem to have been accepted by nations today, I sometimes have difficulty reconciling my moral convictions with the tangled world being handed down to us by the adults. Apparently what I must do to make life more endurable, is to follow my principles, with the hope that enough of this feeling will rub off on my associates to begin a chain reaction. To a thinking person, such resolutions are very valuable; nevertheless, they often leave a vacuum in the soul. Churches are trying to fill this vacuum, each by its own method. During this year, I have visited churches ranging from orthodoxy to extreme liberalism. In my search for a personal faith, I consider it my duty to expose myself to all forms of religion. Each church has left something within me – either a new concept of God and man, or an understanding and respect for those of other beliefs. I have found such experiences with other religions the best means for freeing myself from prejudices. Through my visits, the reasoning of fundamentalists has become clearer to me, but I am still unable to accept it. I have a simple faith in the Deity and a hope that my attempts to live a decent life are pleasing to Him. If I were to discover that there is no afterlife, my motive for moral living would not be destroyed. I have enough of the philosopher in me to love righteousness for its own sake. This is my youthful philosophy, a simple, liberal, and optimistic feeling, though I fear I shall lose some of it as I become more adult. Already, the thought that the traditional thinkers might be right, after all, and I wrong, has made me waver. Still, these are my beliefs at sixteen. If I am mistaken, I am too young to realize my error. Sometimes, in a moment of mental despair, I think of the words, “God loves an honest doubter,” and am comforted. This I Believe, Inc. clean 16492 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/15381/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/15381/#comments Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/15381/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/15381/feed/ 0 environment,hope,place After Hurricane Katrina destroyed his adopted home, social worker Mike Miller had opportunities to move anywhere in the country. But he believes he’ll stay right where he belongs: in New Orleans. I believe in attachment to place. I believe that watermarks fade, tears dry, and lives mend. A year after the flood, the nation is remembering Hurricane Katrina. And some of us, whether labeled "displaced," "evacuated," or "back home," will wonder if we still believe. We will wonder—sitting on our porches, in our bar rooms, and in our gutted homes—if we still should believe. When I left New Orleans, I found myself, like thousands of displaced Gulf Coast residents, living on the generosity of others. People opened their homes to me. In some ways, life was easier. I'd almost forgotten how tough it is to live in New Orleans. In Chicago I was offered jobs that pay three times more than anything I could make in New Orleans. I thought about moving: Seattle, Anchorage, New York, Key West, Tucson, and everywhere in between. But looking at a map spread on a table I already knew. My home is New Orleans... still. I moved back into an apartment uptown in the Twelfth Ward—on the third floor this time. I'm a little paranoid about flooding. But now I can really hear the foghorns of the ships on the river. Life in New Orleans is hard nowadays. I work for the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, and the mental health scene is not good: Depression is rampant. Suicides and substance abuse have been on the rise since Katrina. I'm also back bartending and, mixed in with the grief, I can feel the pulse still there. We live the best we can. It's like this street musician in the Quarter who always says, "Man, we're just trying to get back to abnormal!" I believe the soul of this place cannot be easily destroyed by wind and rain. I believe the music here will live and people will continue to dance. I believe in "Darlin"' and "Baby." I believe in "Where 'yat?" and "Makin' groceries." I believe in neighborhoods where Mardi Gras Indians sew  beaded costumes, kids practice trumpet in the street, and recipes for okra can provide conversation for an entire afternoon. My family asked me why I wanted to return to New Orleans. "Why do you want to live somewhere where garbage is piled up, rents have doubled, there are no jobs, and houses are filled with black mold? Is it safe? Is it healthy?" They ask if New Orleans is still worth it. I don't have an answer to satisfy them; I can't really even give myself an answer. I keep hearing Louis Armstrong saying, "Man, if ya gotta ask, you'll never know." I'm just 26, my clothes can all fit in a backpack; I've got a graduate degree in social work and a 65-pound bulldog. I could move anywhere at all, but I believe in this place. I believe I belong here. As hard as it is to live in New Orleans now, it's even harder to imagine living anywhere else. This I Believe, Inc. clean 15381 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16608/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16608/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16608/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16608/feed/ 0 charity & service,courage,equality,faith & religion,integrity,purpose,responsibility,self-knowledge United Nations’ Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold gleaned his belief in the value of public service from his family’s line of soldiers, government officials, scholars and clergymen. Hammarskjold said willing fulfillment of duty was an expression of love. The world in which I grew up was dominated by principles and ideals of a time far from ours and, as it may seem, far removed from the problems facing a man of the middle of the twentieth century. However, my way has not meant a departure from those ideals. On the contrary, I have been led to an understanding of their validity also for our world of today. Thus, a never abandoned effort frankly and squarely to build up a personal belief in the light of experience and honest thinking has led me to recognize and endorse, unreservedly, those very beliefs which once were handed down to me. From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father’s side I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country--or humanity. This service required likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions. From scholars and clergymen on my mother’s side I inherited a belief that, in the very radical sense of the Gospels, all men were equals as children of God, and should be met and treated by us as our masters in God. Faith is a state of the mind and the soul. The language of religion is a set of formulas which register a basic spiritual experience. I was late in understanding what this meant. When I finally reached that point, the beliefs in which I was once brought up were recognized by me as mine in their own right and by my free choice. I feel that I can endorse those convictions without any compromise with the demands of that intellectual honesty which is the very key to maturity of mind. The two ideals which dominated my childhood world met me fully harmonized and adjusted to the demands of our world of today in the ethics of Albert Schweitzer, where the ideal of service is supported by and supports the basic attitude to man set forth in the Gospels. In his work I also found a key for modern man to the world of the Gospels. But the explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of the spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics for whom "self-surrender" had been the way to self-realization, and who in "singleness of mind" and "inwardness" had found strength to say yes to every fate and demand life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty. "Love," that much misused and misinterpreted word, for them meant simply an overflowing of the strength with which they felt themselves filled when living in true self-oblivion. And this love found natural expressions in an unhesitant fulfillment of duty and in an unreserved acceptance of life, whatever it brought them personally of toil, suffering--or happiness. I know that their discoveries about the laws of inner life and of action have not lost their significance. This I Believe, Inc. clean 16608 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23041/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23041/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 02:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23041/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/23041/feed/ 0 creativity,education & knowledge,family Musician Bela Fleck has gained critical acclaim for moving the banjo from its traditional roots into jazz and classical genres. He believes figuring out how to do things his own may made that possible. I believe in figuring out my own way to do things. This approach can yield great results, but it's got its negative sides. Much of my individualist, bone-headed nature comes from my grandfather. Opa grew up in New York's rough-and-tumble Lower East Side, didn't go to college, but owned and ran two successful businesses: a restaurant and a car wash. He figured out what he wanted to do, and how to do it without studying a manual. He used his own creativity to solve problems as they came up. After he died, realtors tried to sell his home. They discovered he had devised his own way of hooking up the septic system. No one could figure out how it worked, so it couldn't pass codes. But it worked, and for many years beyond his time. Sometimes I wonder if my banjo playing would pass codes. I didn't learn to play bluegrass, classical music or jazz in school. I took banjo lessons from some of the best, but my breakthrough moments came when I left the lesson plans. I remember seeing jazz great Chick Corea when I was 17. There was a moment of revelation when I realized that all the notes he was playing had to exist on my banjo. I went home and stayed up most of the night, figuring out the scales, modes and arpeggios for myself, mapping out the banjo fingerboard in my own way. When I perform with my own group, my map of the banjo is all I need. But when I move into more conventional jazz or classical situations, I don't always have the tools to fit in. I can barely read music. I don't thoroughly understand the conventions of each tradition and I'm not sure how to voice jazz chords — which notes to leave out, how the scales work, all the rhythmic concepts. I heard that when George Gershwin wanted to study harmony from Ravel, he was advised against it. Ravel felt that Gershwin would obliterate the very thing that made him special by learning conventional approaches to rhythm and harmony. I'd like to think that the same is true for me, but I'm not convinced. I worry that my approach might not be built on a strong enough musical foundation. It's this fear that allows me no rest in my musical pursuits. When I'm at work — whether it is writing, practicing or editing and mixing CDs — I obsess. To say that I am picky is an understatement. Delegating is pretty much impossible; I can be downright controlling. I have to get everything just right. Then, one day, the intensity disappears. This usually means the project is done. My grandfather didn't seem to worry that he was making it up as he went along, and I try not to either. I believe in living with and giving in to my obsessive side when it serves the music. I believe in doing things my own way, and I want them to last, just like my grandfather's plumbing. This I Believe, Inc. clean 23041 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16467/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16467/#comments Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16467/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16467/feed/ 0 faith & religion As a minister’s daughter, Ruth Cranston knew the teachings of the Bible, but she longed to discover the deeper values that shaped all the world’s religions. Cranston found a belief on which to build her life in the words of Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, I was blessed with a father and mother whose lives were shining lessons in character and goodness. As a child, I heard the Bible read daily. But the doctrines of the church were confusing and never very real to me. I had not worked out a personal belief or philosophy of my own, when trouble struck—as it did early, and hard. Casting about for something solid to hang on to in that difficult time, I began studying the great spiritual systems of the world for myself. Not the present day doctrines, but the original teachings of the founders of religion: the world's great prophets and seers. I was struck with two things: First, the simplicity of the teachings of the great masters of religion. Second, the similarities in their teachings and the repetition of certain fundamental principles, which appeared again and again. I heard them from the Hindu pundits at Benares, and from the yellow-robed high priests at the Buddhist college in Ceylon, at the family shrine of a humble hill-town weaver in south India, and in the magnificent Temple of Confucius in Peking. The same truths. And how long they had endured, through ages and centuries, while all else changed. But they remained. Why? Surely they must hold something very close to reality. As I listened and pondered and steeped my mind in these great truths of all time, my own problems here in this present time cleared up. I began to see my way, and a possible philosophy for a person of this modern day and age filtering through the simple statements of Jesus and Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, and Moses. I began to feel firm ground under my feet. They taught the unity of all life; the interdependence of all men; love and service to fellow man; help, not exploitation, of the weak and backward. They taught nonviolence and non-injury. They all taught purity of life and of motive, simplicity of life too, and that true riches are within. They taught the worth of individual man and the ability of every man to rise to higher states of development than we are now experiencing. They taught the immortality of the soul and the building of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. People say, yes these are noble truths—a grand ideal—but they won’t work in practical everyday existence. Gandhi worked them. St. Francis worked them. Modern business executives are working them in scores of successful business enterprises. After a life spent among many different peoples, I am convinced that they are the only things that will work—for you, for me, for us all. A pattern of life, putting into concrete daily practice these eternal truths, taught by every prophet of God from time immemorial. No atom bomb can destroy them. No scientific theory can nullify them. For me they constitute a solid rock on which to build my life and the life of the whole world in these or any other times. This I Believe, Inc. clean 16467 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/22868/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/22868/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/22868/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/22868/feed/ 0 carpe diem,creativity,education & knowledge,popular culture With movies like A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13 to his credit, Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer could rest on his laurels. But that’s not for him. Grazer believes in disrupting his comfort zone. I was 45 years old when I decided to learn how to surf. Picture this: The north shore of Oahu—the toughest, most competitive surfing spot on the planet. Fourteen-foot swells. Twenty tattooed locals. And me, 5-foot-8-inches of abject terror. What will get me first, I wondered, the next big wave or the guy to my right with the tattoo on his chest that reads "RIP"? They say that life is tough enough. But I guess I like to make things difficult on myself, because I do that all the time. Every day and on purpose. That's because I believe in disrupting my comfort zone. When I started out in the entertainment business, I made a list of people I thought it would be good to meet. Not people who could give me a job or a deal, but people who could shake me up, teach me something, challenge my ideas about myself and the world. So I started calling up experts in all kinds of fields: trial lawyers, neurosurgeons, CIA agents, embryologists, firewalkers, police chiefs, hypnotists, forensic anthropologists, and even presidents. Some of them—like Carlos Castaneda, Jonas Salk, and Fidel Castro—were world-famous. Of course, I didn't know any of these people and none of them knew me. So when I called these people up to ask for a meeting, the response wasn't always friendly. And even when they agreed to give me some of their time, the results weren't always what one might describe as pleasant. Take, for example, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. You've heard of him? However, he'd never heard of me. It took me a year of begging, cajoling, and more begging to get to him to agree to meet with me. And then what happened? He ridiculed me and insulted me. But that was okay. I was hoping to learn something from him—and I did, even if it was only that I'm not that interesting to a physicist with no taste for our pop culture. Over the last 30 years, I've produced more than 50 movies and 20 television series. I'm successful and, in my business, pretty well known. I'm a guy who could retire to the golf course tomorrow where the worst that could happen is that my Bloody Mary is watered-down. So why do I continue to subject myself to this sort of thing? The answer is simple: Disrupting my comfort zone, bombarding myself with challenging people and situations—this is the best way I know to keep growing. And to paraphrase a biologist I once met, if you're not growing, you're dying. So maybe I'm not the best surfer on the north shore, but that's okay. The discomfort, the uncertainty, the physical and mental challenge that I get from this—all the things that too many of us spend our time and energy trying to avoid—they are precisely the things that keep me in the game. This I Believe, Inc. clean 22868 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16673/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16673/#comments Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16673/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16673/feed/ 0 change,self-knowledge Novelist Aldous Huxley said past attempts to improve the world yielded some neat gadgets, indoor plumbing and personal hygiene. Yet Huxley believed individuals could make life better in the future by harnessing intelligence, In every one of the higher religions, there is a strain of infinite optimism on the one hand and on the other, a profound pessimism. In the depths of our being, they all teach there is an inner light, but an inner light which our egotism keeps, for most of the time, in a state of more or less complete eclipse. If, however, it so desires, the ego can get out of the way, so to speak, can dis-eclipse the light and become identified with its divine source, hence the unlimited optimism of the traditional religions. Their pessimism springs from the observed fact that though all are called, few are chosen for the sufficient reason that few choose to be chosen. To me, this older conception of man’s nature and destiny seems more realistic, more nearly in accord with the given facts than any form of modern utopianism. In the Lord’s Prayer, we are taught to ask for the blessing, which consists in not being led into temptation. The reason is only too obvious. When temptations are very great or unduly prolonged, most persons succumb to them. To devise a perfect social order is probably beyond our powers, but I believe that it is perfectly possible for us to reduce the number of dangerous temptations to a level far below that which is tolerated at the present time. A society so arranged that there shall be a minimum of dangerous temptations—this is the end towards which, as a citizen, I have to strive. In my efforts to achieve that end, I can make use of a great variety of means. Do good ends justify the use of intrinsically bad means? On the level of theity, the point can be argued indefinitely. In practice, meanwhile, I find that the means employed invariably determine the nature of the end achieved. Indeed, as Mahatma Gandhi was never tired of insisting, the means are the end in its preliminary stages. Men have put forth enormous efforts to make their world a better place to live in. But except in regard to gadgets, plumbing, and hygiene, their success has been pathetically small. Hell, as the proverb has it, is paved with good intentions. And so long as we go on trying to realize our ideals by bad or merely inappropriate means, our good intentions will come to the same bad ends. In this consists the tragedy and the irony of history. Can I, as an individual, do anything to make future history a little less tragic and less ironic than history past, and present? I believe I can. As a citizen, I can use all my intelligence and all my goodwill to develop political means that shall be of the same kind and quality as the ideal ends which I am trying to achieve. And as a person, as a psychophysical organism, I can learn how to get out of the way so that the divine source of my life and consciousness can come out of eclipse and shine through me. This I Believe, Inc. clean 16673 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/18/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/18/#comments Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/18/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/18/feed/ 0 creativity,disability,empathy & compassion,love,pets & animals As a person living with autism, Temple Grandin explains that she lives by concrete rules, not abstract beliefs. Without the ability to process abstract thought, she thinks in pictures and in sounds. Because I have autism, I live by concrete rules instead of abstract beliefs. And because I have autism, I think in pictures and sounds. Here's how my brain works: It's like the search engine Google for images. If you say the word "love" to me, I'll surf the Internet inside my brain. Then, a series of images pops into my head. What I'll see is a picture of a mother horse with a foal. Or I think of "Herbie the Love Bug," scenes from the movie Love Story, or the Beatles song, "Love, love, all you need is love..." When I was a child, my parents taught me the difference between good and bad behavior by showing me specific examples. My mother told me that you don't hit other kids because you would not like it if they hit you. That makes sense. But, if my mother told me to be "nice" to someone, it was too vague for me to comprehend. But if she said that being nice meant delivering daffodils to a next door neighbor, that I could understand. I believe that doing practical things can make the world a better place. When I was in my twenties I thought a lot about the meaning of life. At the time, I was getting started in my career of designing more humane facilities for animals at ranches and slaughterhouses. Many people would think that to even work at a slaughterhouse would be inhumane, but they forget that every human and animal eventually dies. In my mind, I had a picture of a way to make that dying as peaceful as possible. Back in the 1970s, I went to fifty different feedlots and ranches in Arizona and Texas and helped them work cattle. I cataloged the parts of each facility that worked effectively. I took the best loading ramps, sorting pens, single-file chutes, crowd pens, and other components and assembled them into an ideal new system. I get great satisfaction when a rancher tells me that my corral design helps cattle move through it quietly and easily. When cattle stay calm, it means they are not scared. And that makes me feel I've accomplished something important. Some people might think if I could snap my fingers I'd choose to be "normal." But, I wouldn't want to give up my ability to see in beautiful, precise pictures. I believe in them. This I Believe, Inc. clean 18 http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16343/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16343/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:00:00 +0000 This I Believe, Inc. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16343/ http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16343/feed/ 0 equality,freedom ACLU founder Roger Baldwin believed in the lofty goals of abolishing war, ending poverty, resolving racial and international strife, and expanding liberty. While success may not always be possible, Baldwin said there is valor in ceaselessly trying. I’m what most people would call a reformer. Although born into a well-to-do family in New England, I have always been concerned with the poverty and injustice I saw around me. And from my earliest days, I tried to do something about them. This belief in the duty of social action, I suppose, came with a Puritan heritage expressed in Unitarianism, in the Abolitionist Movement, and in the pioneering movements and thinking with which I was surrounded in my youth in Boston. I became a professional social worker in settlements, in children’s courts, in political reform, and for the last thirty years in the protection and expansion of those civil liberties which are the motive power of our democracy, whether in this country or in the world. My major efforts now are directed to their expansion to the United Nations. Looking over the state of the human race today, I can’t say that my activities have been rewarded by practical success. But I belong to that school of optimists that holds it more important to try than to succeed. And it’s worth ceaseless trying to oppose war and violence, to attack poverty, and to expand liberty. I know that it takes enduring faith to believe that mankind will abolish war; that it will produce and fairly share enough goods to make the mass poverty of our world only a bitter memory and overcome all the tragic divisions of racial and national supremacy. But we have a goal already set forth in a document, which summarizes my beliefs in practical language: that of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by most of the nations represented in the United Nations Assembly. Of course any such goal sounds visionary in today’s desperate crisis. But I believe that mankind, since the World War, has been engaged in a revolutionary struggle toward it. No institution now goes unchallenged. I have seen in my lifetime most of the colonial peoples throw off the rule of alien masters. I have seen the darker peoples everywhere challenge white supremacy; seen the trade unions and labor parties grow enormously in political power. And I’ve seen women achieve equality in law with men. The sense of internationalism, despite the bitter conflicts of nations today, gropes toward a world community through the United Nations. My beliefs seem unduly optimistic in so discouraging an era. I gain support for faith from the historic failure of all dictatorships and of all tyrannies. I can’t despair when so many people all over the world are determined to advance, at any sacrifice, the cause of justice and equality and freedom. This universal ferment cannot result if these forces prevail, either in the false salvation of communism, or the desperate resort to fascism, or in the catastrophe of another World War. Democracy, I firmly believe, not reaction, is the answer to communism, but only a democracy which recognizes that only by abolishing poverty can we abolish communism. The high goals to which mankind so gropingly moves are not new. They’ve been voiced through the ages by religious prophets and by social philosophers in all lands. I’m sustained in my faith in them during a lifetime of practical effort, mainly because I’m convinced not only of their justice, but because nothing less will satisfy the needs and hopes of men and women everywhere. 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