As world leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly, it is interesting to read the speech that Keller wrote for the United Nations in 1950.
"Dear Friends:
Truly it is an exalted privilege for me to address such a splendid gathering representing the humanitarian public spirit of world citizenship. As United Nations Week brings home to us the far-speeding activities of our global Prometheus, it is fitting that we hail an organization whose final triumph is bound up with the salvation and welfare of mankind. It is as if the Pentecostal tongues of fire had descended upon earth.
Last Spring I attended a meeting of a committee on the blind under UNESCO in Paris which was trying to unify the divergent Braille systems used by the sightless throughout the earth, and I have been thrilled by its victory in devising a world Braille script which will enable them to communicate freely with each other, to exchange ideas and information and grasp more fully the treasures of intellectual life.
If it was possible to gain this benefit for the fourteen million blind of the world, what cannot we accomplish for peace, when the Security Council has prevented or stopped wars that involved one-fourth of our race? And there is incalculable challenge in the United Nations’ achievement of establishing a code of human rights that will ultimately shed its blessings upon every land. Already it is a guiding star in the protection of mandated peoples and assistance both technical and financial to backward or undeveloped areas. There are other luminous rays of encouragement in the fact that through the United Nations hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa are being lifted from humiliating dependence to equality in the world community.
Another story rich with significance for all men is the energy with which the United Nations through its World Health Organization and UNESCO is combating age-old epidemics, laboring to promote fundamental education for backward communities in the Middle and Far East, and facilitating access for all study groups to the science, literature, philosophy and scholarship of the different countries. And those huge enterprises were begun only four years ago!
I believe that the majority of mankind are essentially decent, and that as they know more fully the problems that are agitating one another’s minds, they will draw closer together. I do not think that the difficulty is lack of moral forces. There are plenty of brains and goodwill, and as soon as the peoples are satisfied that we are moving along roads of practical living, we can be sure of understanding and cooperation everywhere.
Let us then hold up the hands of the United Nations in its noble efforts to abolish ignorance, prejudice and strife, to kindle faith in the dignity of many, and to distribute equitably the fruits of his knowledge and achievement.
Hartford, Conn. October 27, 1950
Image: Helen Keller is seen "listening" to a debate at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Keller's companion Polly Thomson manually signs into Keller's right hand, interpreting what is being said. November 23rd, 1949.
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