Originally broadcast on CHED radio - Date unknown

There are destructive attitudes abroad in our society today - attitudes which should cause us as parents and responsible citizens a great deal of concern. In regard to these attitudes we must take much of the blame for their prevalence, because we are all a party to them. Last night, with a teenage boy sitting beside me, I thumbed through a recent copy of our national magazine which showed the pictures of the Vietnamese campaign. As an experiment, I pointed to a photograph of 10 dead Viet Cong soldiers lying face up beside a muddy road. I said to the lad, "What do you think of that"? He looked at the picture for a moment, and then said "So what, they are only Viet Cong". It frightens me that we have become so accustomed to brutality and to death, that such photographs and such happenings no longer really concern us, providing it is only the enemy that is dead. This kind of thing is a cancer which can eventually grow and destroy us. We saw it in the last war, when photographs came in from Europe and the Pacific Islands. We were appalled at the photographs of the Allied troops, but if the photographs depicted the dead enemy, we would think in our minds they are only Japanese, or they are only Germans. The value of human life has dropped to an all time low, and will eventually if it has not already begun to, reflect in our own attitudes within our own society. Human life will become of no consequence. We are all searching for some peaceful solution to the worlds problems. We are all searching for the answer to hatred. We will not find these answers until we get the value of human life in proper perspective. We must care as much for the Viet Cong as we do for the American. We must be as concerned with the Negro as we are with our white neighbor. We must help the Indian as often as we help our best friend who lives down the block. I am 42 years old today and I cannot remember a period in my life when men were not killing men in some area of the world. To me the answer is so simple, it was voiced over 2000 years ago by another leader who was crucified, it consists of only three words, "love one another”.