Visitor

Think how our world would look to a visitor from another planet as he crossed the continents.  He would find great cities and knowledge able to create enormous abundance from the materials of nature.  He would witness exploration into understanding of the entire physical universe, from the particles of the atom to the secrets of life.  He would see billions of people, separated by only a few hours of flight, communicating with the speed of light, sharing a common dependence on a thin layer of soil and a covering of air.  He would also observe that most of mankind was living in misery and hunger, that some of the inhabitants of this tiny, crowded globe were killing others, that a few patches of land were pointing huge instruments of death and war at others.  Since what he was seeing proved our intelligence, he would only wonder at our sanity. 

It is this monstrous absurdity--that in the midst of such possibility, men should hate and kill and oppress one another--that must be target of the modern American revolution.

--Robert F. Kennedy, October 11, 1966