To the antediluvian deluded

By Christian Bentley

The United Nations has on many occasions been a force with which to do good, it has been for almost a century a power of world-wide proportions that has the capability and the ability to perform great deeds and to provide a format for the unity of humanity. This species, forever in the past ripped apart by notions of international competition and national borders, is coming to a point in time where we must make a decision. We must choose to either self-destruct or to move forward. We must choose whether to fade or to shine, to continue or to halt; to die or to live. We must make the decision to start to treat one another not as foreign insurgents but as cousins, brothers, and sisters, descended from a common ancestor, united by the fact that the same blood runs through our veins whether we are Caucasian or Negro or Asian or Hispanic, whether we are gay or straight, religious or atheist.

I assume, Mr. Secretary-General, that you are here where you are because you believe that humanity deserves a fighting chance, that we deserve a chance to live unhindered by war or famine, poverty or arrogance. You’re here because you know that equality is justice and justice is humanity’s last and only great pillar, its final foundation in a world where immovable, stalwart creed and ignorance provide a hurdle that we must overcome if we intend to live forever as a species and as a civilisation. You are here because you know for a fact that upon the birth of every human being, they are awarded a certain set of rights, unalienable and concrete, and that among these is the right to never have your rights supressed by others, for your life is your own to do with as you see fit, and for any one person or any organisation to seek to take them from you represents the most abhorrent of all the failures of this species.

We, the generation who will take over from yours, see it as a truth that we must fight, even if it is a fight that we cannot win, to right the wrongs that occur every day. To stop the killing that is carried out every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month. We will fight to reverse the dramatic damage our actions are having upon our planet, we will fight to put food on every person’s plate, we will fight so that love is recognised as love regardless of gender and so that our children will be able to grow up in a world where past mistakes have been reversed and that the only things that they need worry about will be the bettering of our civilisation and of our civilisation’s knowledge base.

But, unfortunately, if you do not kick-start the change now, I fear our fight will be a fruitless one. I fear that we may be too late, that we may have left it too late to save ourselves and to save the world in which we live. If I could, I would give this message, in full, to the United Nations General Assembly, and drum it into each and every representative of each and every member state so that they have it pressing against their conscience every moment for the rest of their lives.

The choice, right now, is yours, Mr. Secretary-General.