April 24, 1971 video of John Denver singing "The Strangest Dream" at a peace march in Washington DC. The song, written by Ed McCurdy about 1950, became one of the anthems of the Vietnam war era. If you have trouble playing here, click to see it on YouTube.
* Why "A Million Copies"? It's a significant number; an audacious goal. It's a phrase perhaps best defined by Ed McCurdy's lyric in "Last Night I had the Strangest Dream"; "...and when the paper was all signed, and a million copies made..." Listen to John Denver sing these words on this page.
Affirmation of Human Oneness
University of Minnesota Professor Emeritus Joseph Schwartzberg , a life-long peace and justice activist, drafted An Affirmation of Human Oneness in 1976. Originally, it had a slightly different wording than at present and began with the words "I am a member of the human family. My home is Earth."
The inspiration for the Affirmation came from a book by Edwin O. Reischauer, Education for a Changing World. Reischauer, a former US ambassador to Japan, argued for the necessity of educating youth, beginning in kindergarten, to think like global citizens. In keeping with that argument, the Afffirmation was written in the hope that it would be used in school assemblies to supplement, but not to replace, more narrowly focused nationalistic statements such as the American Pledge of Allegiance to the nation's flag.
In 1992, to help in a celebration of Earth Day, Professor Schwartzberg requested competent colleagues and associates to translate the Affirmation into all 22 languages of the world that were spoken by at least fifty million people and were also the official language of at least one country. Additional translations followed. As of 2008, the Affirmation has been translated into the 39 languages listed below.
After forty years as a professor of geography, mainly at the University of Minnesota, but also at the University of Pennsylvania and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Professor Schwartzberg retired in 2000. His most notable scholarly achievement was the production of a monumental Historical Atlas of South Asia; but he has also written extensively on UN reform. He remains very active in the peace and justice movement, especially in Citizens for Global Solutions and the World Federalist Movement , on whose international Council he serves. His 2004 monograph, Revitalizing the United Nations: Reform through Weighted Voting, can be accessed on the web at www.cwps.org.
Languages into which the Affirmation of Human Oneness has been translated:
Arabic
Bahasa Indonesia/Malay
Bengali
Chinese
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Farsi (Persian)
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hausa
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Italian
Kannada
Kashmiri
Khmer (Cambodian)
Korean
Marathi
Norwegian
Ojibway
Polish
Portugese
Punjabi
Russian
Sanskrit
Sinhala
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Urdu
Vietnamese
