Rambling on about a time in history I would like to be there for…|

If I could go back and visit one account of history, I would not choose a moment of celebration alone. I would choose a moment wrapped in grief, exhaustion, hope, and fear: the end of World War II and the gathering in San Francisco in 1945, when delegates from fifty nations met to imagine a world that might finally learn how to keep peace.

I would want to stand quietly in that time and watch it unfold. Not to interrupt it. Not to change it. Only to see the faces of people who had lived through a war so large that the world itself seemed wounded. Europe and Asia lay in smoldering ruins. Millions were dead. Millions more were homeless, hungry, and uncertain of what tomorrow could even mean. The Russians were closing in on the last remnants of German resistance, while the United States was still battling entrenched Japanese forces across Pacific islands, including Okinawa.

And yet, in the middle of destruction, those delegates gathered. Between April 25 and June 26, 1945, they met at the United Nations Conference on International Organization and worked toward a charter meant to promote peace and prevent future wars. Their mission was plain, but enormous. They were not simply writing words on paper. They were trying to build a promise strong enough to stand against the memory of two world wars.

“We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…”

Those words still feel heavy. They do not sound like politics to me. They sound like mourning. They sound like parents who buried children, soldiers who carried memories they could never lay down, and entire cities that had forgotten what ordinary life looked like. They sound like people who knew war was not glory. It was ash, hunger, silence, and empty chairs at kitchen tables.

The Charter of the United Nations went into effect on October 24, 1945. That date matters because it reminds us that peace is not just a feeling. It must be organized, defended, and renewed. It must be chosen by people who understand what happens when nations forget the cost of hatred, pride, and indifference.

I also think of Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After his death, she continued to carry a deep concern for human dignity onto the world stage. Her later work for human rights reminds me that peace is not only the absence of war. Peace is also food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, justice for the forgotten, and dignity for every human life.

Maybe the horrors of war have become distant again. Maybe they always do when the witnesses grow fewer, and the photographs turn old. We have never truly been a war-free world. Even after 1945, conflict continued, and suffering found new names and new borders. Still, I believe that moment in San Francisco deserves to be remembered with reverence. It was not perfect. No human effort ever is. But it was a serious attempt by wounded nations to say… ENOUGH…

If I could stand there, I would listen more than I would speak. I would look at the delegates and wonder what they carried into that room. What they carried was grief, guilt, duty, hope. I would want to remember that history is not only dates and documents. It is human beings trying, after unimaginable loss, to leave the next generation something better than ruins.

To be honest, the world today could stand to go back to that time. To see in real time again the devastation so many choose to ignore or deny. It was all very real. It is being seen again today. I would like to be around in 1948 to see Eleanor Roosevelt in her role as the delegate to the UN who set out to draft the document that would become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or as it was called, the international Magna Carta for all Mankind, as it was adopted in December, 1948. We seem to have lost our humanity again in the last ten years in this country… in the past year alone, we have violated basic humanitarian law with no regard to human life or suffering. It echoes the old saying… “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” As we watch the horrors in the Ukraine and the Gaza Strip unfold.