It's hard to imagine in these happier times, but there was a time when not only this country but the whole world was bitterly divided between free and slave states. But leaders with vision emerged who realized they could achieve the possible at once while the impossible might take only a little longer. Today this country is one rather than two split along the Mason-Dixon line.
And who knows, one day Wendell Willkie's dream of one world will be ordinary reality, too, rather than some utopian scheme. For if Gentle Reader will skim the headlines in Arkansas' Newspaper of late, he'll see a new and better world already emerging day by day and night after night. If we but will it, it is no dream; it is here.
Instead of remaining enemies, why shouldn't East and West join forces? Will the long enslaved subjects of the Kim dynasty ever know freedom? Just give them a taste of it, and there'll be no need to insist on the North Korean regime's being destroyed. It will fall of its own weight, just as the Soviet regime imploded once its subjects got their first taste of what life could be like without commissars dictating their every move.
Mikhail Gorbachev's big mistake was to think he could stop the process of freedom after he'd opened just one crack in its facade. But the crack expanded like the Siberian ice once the thaw set in, and soon freedom was flowing everywhere.
All that's necessary is to stand aside and avoid being crushed by the debris of a discredited dictatorship. Just let freedom flow; it will prove unstoppable. There is something in man that yearns to be free despite all the sophisticates' assurances to the contrary.
Meanwhile, there is both joy and despair mixed in Jerusalem, where the American president's long-awaited decision to finally move the American embassy to that country's ancient capital was greeted gratefully by Jewish Israelis but denounced by Arab ones. You take your pick of which side to join--that of the celebrants or that of the mourners. That millennial day when all sing His praises in a common tongue has yet to arrive.
Whatever your belief or lack of one may be, it's worth holding fast till all are finally reconciled. The long wait for its fulfillment will one day be justified in the eyes of all men.
Editorial on 05/17/2018