Welcoming Addresses by Presidents of 2010 WSHR

REMARKS FOR WORLD CITIZENSHIP DAY ON APRIL 1 IN TAIWAN BY DOUGLAS MATTERN, PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION OF WORLD CITIZENS - SAN FRANCISCO , CALIFORNIA


I want to express my greetings from the Association of World Citizens (AWC) Headquarters in San Francisco to all the participants on this important celebration of World Citizens Day, and a special greetings and thank you to Dr. Hong for organizing this event. Today marks the 9 th year that World Citizenship Day has been held. And it was with the help of Dr Hong and the Tai Ji Men that AWC initiated World Citizenship Day. This took place on the first day of Spring in the year 2000, the fist spring day of the new millennium. We held this event in San Francisco with a very spectacular performed by over 300 performers coming with Dr. Hong to San Francisco . This included very talented musicians, dancers, and speakers, including the Mayor of San Francisco, the Honorable Willie Brown Jr.

We come together on this day to proclaim our common humanity and the imperative need to work together to build a better and safer world for the 21 st century and beyond. For it is World Citizenship that is the one binding concept that is capable of transcending the racial, religious, political, ethnic, and geographic differences that divide us.

World Citizenship is not a replacement for national and regional citizenship duties, but rather a new way of thinking in this interdependent world to work together to secure our common fate.

World Citizens are committed to create a world that is free of nuclear weapons, and we know that human rights can never be fully achieved as long as nuclear weapons threaten our very existence. And World Citizens are committed to end the war system and the war business that is draining our wealth and resources that are desperately needed to end hunger and poverty, and solve environment programs. To this end World Citizens are committed to the goal of a world where conflicts between nations and peoples are settled through the civilized framework of enforceable world law.

I know these topics and the other very important issues that are on today's program will be discussed at today's meeting and that new and brave new approaches to resolve this issues will be the result.

Appropriate for this meeting is this poem on the great struggle for peace by the playwright Bertolt Brecht

There are those who struggle for a day

And they are good

There are those who struggle for a year

And they are better

There are those who struggle all their lives

These are the indispensable ones

Everyone participating in today's meeting, what ever your age, are the indispensable ones.

Gook luck and I wait with great anticipation to learn the results of the meeting.