War & Peace
Cassy York
Grade 12
My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions.
As soon as men will find that in one instant whole armies can be utterly
destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace. "Alfred Bernhard Nobel."
Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1833, to Immanuel and
Andrietta Nobel. The year that Nobel was born, his father declared bankruptcy
and went to Russia to start over. That ultimately led to Nobelıs fine education
and success. His father started successful mechanical workshops and made
breakthrough discoveries and designs in arms and steam engines. He made his
fortune off of these ventures and was able to have his sons taught by the best
private teachers money could buy. Alfred Nobel went abroad to study when he was
seventeen and worked in a laboratory in Paris where he met the inventor of
nitroglycerine. Nobel was fascinated by nitroglycerine, and its explosiveness.
He made it his goal to discover how to use nitroglycerine safely and
effectively. He accomplished this by mixing it with a paste and forming rods
that he named dynamite. Nobelıs goal for dynamite was to make industry more
efficient and safer. He was a peace advocate who willed his money to be used as
prizes for outstanding achievements in a sciences, literature, and peace.
³To kill a man will be considered as disgusting [in the twentieth
century] as we in this day consider it disgusting to eat one.² - Andrew
Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835. Thirteen years later his
family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Although he was the richest man
alive during his time, he felt that it was very important for men to experience
poverty to build character. He also felt that education was vital for all peopleıs
lives. He made his fortune by building and investing in industry, but one of his
greatest joys was the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh that he founded. He built
many more libraries and gave the majority of his money to strive towards the
goal of enlightening peopleıs minds. He believed that all people have goodness
in them and most will make the right decisions.
³The greatest waste in the world is the difference between what we are
and what we could become.² - Ben Herbster
Dr. Ben Herbster was the founder of the United Church of Christ. He
devoted his life to serving the United Church of Christ as president, trustee
for United Church Homes, and as a chairman for remodeling, expanding, and
raising money for the communities of United Church Homes. He also devoted much
time to helping the elderly, which is who the United Church Homes help, and
expanded the organization of service.
³To preserve peace, we need weapons of smaller and men of larger caliber.²
- Unknown
The quotes from Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie approach peace from
extremely different viewpoints, but they both thought that the same goal would
become reality. Nobel thought that once people learned the power that dynamite
held, they would be terrified and rather than risking horrible deaths by
explosives that they would flee from it. Nobel was wrong. When people learned
the power that dynamite could contain in one little stick, they went crazy over
it and wanted the power for themselves to hoard over others. The invention of
dynamite was just a stepping stone to bigger and more catastrophic weapons.
Now countries of the world have nuclear bombs. They use them with
the full intent to kill as many people and cause as much damage as possible, or
they use them to threaten enemy countries with the idea that the entire country
could be obliterated with the command to ³nuke them.² When the United States
dropped the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, the intent was to stop
the war. That would then result in peace after years of suffering, but they also
knew that there would be massive destruction.
Andrew Carnegie was an optimist of human kind; he believed that the act of
murder would become taboo in the twentieth century, but now in the twenty-first
century there are people all over the world who kill each other. Some of them
even feel no remorse because they think itıs their duty to their god to kill
people who are keeping them down. I agree with Ben Herbsterıs quote. If the
terrorists that so painstakingly planned their attacks on September 11th would
have put their minds, time, and energy into doing good for mankind, the world
may have a cure for cancer right now or an invention that would help stop global
warming like an automobile that doesnıt run on gasoline.
People become so obsessed with their own blind hatred that they donıt
realize the potential good that could come from their lives. Instead, the hatred
takes control of their lives and they want to solve the problem with weapons. ³To
preserve peace, we need weapons of smaller and men of larger caliber,² -
Unknown. Each generation is presented with the goal to live up to their
potential and to strive for peace. In order to have peace, people need to be
willing to compromise and to be humble. In many cases, people just want the
credit that is due to them, and they think that their idea is the only way. That
causes anger from people who are on the other side of the argument and rifts are
formed. Peace does not derive from rifts.
The world is now at war. People all over the world want peace but if a the
world is to be at peace the dictators, oppressors (like the Taliban), and all
other terrorists must be stopped. In Israel, many of the Palestiniansı only
weapons are big rocks or clubs and yet they can disrupt the peace. In
Afghanistan, Taliban militia rode horses into battle against the Americans who
have tanks. No matter what weapon a man has, it can cause destruction; but the
character behind the user makes it either effective or a failure. Now men must
once again strive for peace by using weapons of large caliber against the
terrorists that plague the world, but the world can only hope that once peace is
attained that the men with the larger caliber weapons will look inside
themselves and find that the larger caliber must be found within and only then
can true and lasting peace be achieved.
Back