Read Online Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda - Free Book Online
Authors: Alan Alda
Tags: United States, General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Actors, Biography, Actors - United States, Alda; Alan
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like clockwork. And the clock it runs like is a cuckoo clock.
I couldn’t do much about the bomb. I’m sorry. I started working for a treaty to ban nuclear tests almost twenty years ago, when you were very small. But instead of things getting better, they’ve got worse.
Scientists have calculated that the three hundred million dollars it took to wipe out smallpox in the last decade are equal to five hours of the military budget.
Eighty percent of the world’s illness is caused by contaminated water, yet the cost of a sanitary global water supply is equal to three weeks of the arms race.
I know that today these words sound like the ravings of a naïve Hollywood liberal, but in a way, I can’t help it. I grew up in an age when this kind of woolly thinking was common. Take, for instance, this stinging denunciation of war and the preparations for war by a typical lefty of my youth:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
These words, which today might seem dangerously close to undermining our national defense, were spoken in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I wanted to speak to Elizabeth’s hope and cheerfulness, but there were a string of mournful events fresh in my mind that day, and I couldn’t keep away from them. I had just spent almost ten years campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. Scenes from those years still flashed in my mind. Eleanor Smeal and I pulling up to a church in Oklahoma, running in, and speaking to a crowd that surged and swayed with energy. Working with dignified, graceful Betty Ford, announcing a countdown campaign in the last year we had to get it ratified. Standing with Arlene and our daughters in Lafayette Park outside the White House, urging a crowd of a thousand people to not give up. But here was a time limit on ratification. Time had almost run out in 1979 when Congress voted for an extension. Now, in May 1982, if the amendment wasn’t ratified by three more states within a few weeks, it would not become part of the Constitution, and there was no chance for that to happen.
I wanted to give you a world that respected you as a woman as much as it did me as a man. I wanted the pledge of that respect engraved in our Constitution. But, unless a miracle happens within the next thirty-seven days, you’re not going to get it. You’ll pay the same taxes as a man, Congress can send you to war, just like a man, but you won’t be guaranteed equality of rights under the law. Not this year, and not next year, and maybe not for the rest of this century.
While we were campaigning for the amendment, I heard three fears expressed by opponents with surprising frequency. One was that under the ERA men and women would have to share the same bathrooms. This seems ludicrous now, but people actually expressed this concern on the floor in a number of state assemblies. Another was the worry that women would be forced to fight in the military alongside men, and the third was that states would be forced to allow same-sex marriages. Legal scholars said repeatedly that whether or not these outcomes were desirable, none of them would be mandated by the amendment. But the fears won the day, and the amendment wasn’t ratified.
Our culture changed anyway. Without the amendment, we now have men and women using the same bathrooms (sometimes, in college dorms, the same showers), we have women fighting and dying alongside men in combat zones, and in some states, there are same-sex marriages. But women and men still aren’t guaranteed equality under the Constitution.
There always
I couldn’t do much about the bomb. I’m sorry. I started working for a treaty to ban nuclear tests almost twenty years ago, when you were very small. But instead of things getting better, they’ve got worse.
Scientists have calculated that the three hundred million dollars it took to wipe out smallpox in the last decade are equal to five hours of the military budget.
Eighty percent of the world’s illness is caused by contaminated water, yet the cost of a sanitary global water supply is equal to three weeks of the arms race.
I know that today these words sound like the ravings of a naïve Hollywood liberal, but in a way, I can’t help it. I grew up in an age when this kind of woolly thinking was common. Take, for instance, this stinging denunciation of war and the preparations for war by a typical lefty of my youth:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
These words, which today might seem dangerously close to undermining our national defense, were spoken in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I wanted to speak to Elizabeth’s hope and cheerfulness, but there were a string of mournful events fresh in my mind that day, and I couldn’t keep away from them. I had just spent almost ten years campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. Scenes from those years still flashed in my mind. Eleanor Smeal and I pulling up to a church in Oklahoma, running in, and speaking to a crowd that surged and swayed with energy. Working with dignified, graceful Betty Ford, announcing a countdown campaign in the last year we had to get it ratified. Standing with Arlene and our daughters in Lafayette Park outside the White House, urging a crowd of a thousand people to not give up. But here was a time limit on ratification. Time had almost run out in 1979 when Congress voted for an extension. Now, in May 1982, if the amendment wasn’t ratified by three more states within a few weeks, it would not become part of the Constitution, and there was no chance for that to happen.
I wanted to give you a world that respected you as a woman as much as it did me as a man. I wanted the pledge of that respect engraved in our Constitution. But, unless a miracle happens within the next thirty-seven days, you’re not going to get it. You’ll pay the same taxes as a man, Congress can send you to war, just like a man, but you won’t be guaranteed equality of rights under the law. Not this year, and not next year, and maybe not for the rest of this century.
While we were campaigning for the amendment, I heard three fears expressed by opponents with surprising frequency. One was that under the ERA men and women would have to share the same bathrooms. This seems ludicrous now, but people actually expressed this concern on the floor in a number of state assemblies. Another was the worry that women would be forced to fight in the military alongside men, and the third was that states would be forced to allow same-sex marriages. Legal scholars said repeatedly that whether or not these outcomes were desirable, none of them would be mandated by the amendment. But the fears won the day, and the amendment wasn’t ratified.
Our culture changed anyway. Without the amendment, we now have men and women using the same bathrooms (sometimes, in college dorms, the same showers), we have women fighting and dying alongside men in combat zones, and in some states, there are same-sex marriages. But women and men still aren’t guaranteed equality under the Constitution.
There always
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