UN General Assembly
2002

the towers. Only in the cold world of abstraction does that attack symbolize anything beyond untold suffering. We need to pull violence back from abstraction into the world of human conversation. If people feel excluded from the future, their alienation gives them a mad and violent certainty. We must get to work to rebuild an inclusive and tolerant idea of the future, an idea that is all too easily forgotten in war, an idea of the future in which everybody is protected from those who would destroy it, an idea of the future so strong that it includes those people who might otherwise be tempted by the madness of playing God. That future is premised on awareness, not of the strength of the nuclear nations or of powerful economies, but of the vulnerability of this compact and of individual nations large and small. We must recognize the power of our vulnerability, for in this recognition, we recover our strength, our vision of a common future and the will to act together. It is