6th World Conference of Mayors for Peace, Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombings

Friday 5th August 2005

Greetings to the global peace community - those of us here today - and the many millions with us in spirit.

Here in Hiroshima, and in Nagasaki, it is impossible to not feel that it is here where humanity took a deadly wrong turn on the road of destiny.

It was here that our species first felt the fury and finality of what the foolish like to call our ‘mastery of the atom’.

The only ‘mastery’ shown here was that humans were capable of taking the fatal step in giving us the potential for complete destruction of our species.

It is appropriate that it should also be here, where this horror became reality, that we turn back from that deadly path.

There can be no more fitting time to increase our efforts for peace than when much of the world seems mesmerised by the politics of terror.

The world has known, right here, the ultimate in terror.

It is a form of terror that some think is acceptable because it is held in the hands of governments of major and powerful nations.

It is still terror!

Governments are made of people just as flawed and fallible as any of us here today.

In a world beset with terror, massive economic and social change, and climate change, the path to survival and peace is through embracing our common humanity.

The pursuit of peace is a quest especially suited to a global group such as Mayors for Peace.

We are the ideal medium with which to dilute the poison of terror and war.

As a fellow mayor said to me in New York earlier this year at the United Nations, it is on cities that nuclear bombs will fall, not on governments.

In cities, live people.

I believe that in most people exists the common desire for peace and prosperity.

Mayor to mayor, city to city, and person to person, we can build bridges of understanding and insight beyond the ability of our national leaders and corporate heads.

We already have about 1,000 Mayors involved with the Mayors for Peace movement.

My simple request here today is that this thousand may be joined by thousands more this year.

Our goal is to rid the world of nuclear weapons by the year 2020.

Our worst enemies on this journey will be a sense of cynicism and defeat.

We must not give these enemies any power.

They are illusions used to shackle much of the modern global community into a world of hollow, mindless consumerism.

There is no product more worthy of pursuit than peace.

Without this product the rest of life becomes indeed one of terror, futility and hopelessness.

In my own life journey I have had the joy of overcoming the forces of cynicism and defeat, several times.

A few years ago in New Zealand at a time of very high youth unemployment I started an organisation called the Mayor's Taskforce for Jobs.

Our goal was zero unemployment. We chose to start with youth unemployment.

The cynics said that it could not be done ... that other cities would not join us … that we would always have a number of unemployed people in our communities.

They were wrong.

The majority of New Zealand Mayors are now members of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs.

Our country has about the second lowest rate of unemployment in the developed world.

Our whole attitude toward unemployment has changed.

It changed because some of us said that unemployment was not acceptable and that we needed to be both idealistic and pragmatic at the same time. We took an impossible vision and are well on the way to making it a reality.

Let me illustrate this with another true story:

Before I became Mayor my job was to establish work schemes with groups and communities hurt by the massive economic changes in New Zealand in the 1980’s.

One of the hardest hit were the Maori people living in our coastal town of Kaikoura.

Prosperity had left town, as had hope and optimism.

We talked to the residents to see if we could find something that might be developed to uplift the town.
Some people said that tourists might be interested in taking boats out to sea to watch the migration of whales in the area.

The cynics were dismissive, and the defeated of spirit could not imagine it happening.

But a tiny group could imagine it, and when all other funding failed they mortgaged their own houses to turn this dream into a reality.

These days Kaikoura Whalewatch is rated as one of the top eco-tourism destinations in the world.

It is a booming business, about to become a $100 million business. It has completely revived and renewed its community. It plays an important role in attracting tourists to the South Island of New Zealand and it exists because a few people rejected cynicism and defeat and held onto a vision.

We can do the same with Mayors for Peace. We already have a thousand members representing a thousand cities.

We can rid the world of nuclear terror by a massive insistence on the path of peace.

Let us make this step toward righting the immense wrong done to our common humanity, and let us start today.