Aphrodite Tsairis made these remarks at the 13th annual Alexia Competition at Syracuse University after the judging on February 15, 2003.

With the talk of war intensifying and the threat of terrorism a part of our daily life, our yearnings for peace seem to intensify. There are too few places in our lives where we can practice peace. Yes, one must practice peace. I think we do it here. Eleanor Roosevelt once said "For it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe it. And it isn't enough to believe it. One must work at it." To look beyond our own environment to a world where millions are denied justice or hope or charity, where many go without work or enough to eat or even a roof over their heads and to act on what we see is to practice peace. We do it here.

Think about it for just a minute. We live in the most technologically advanced age in history. We all share in its progress. But as well as sharing the magnificent benefits of this age, we also suffer its malignant threats. If a reactor fails in the Ukraine, its wind-blown poison can touch us all. Conflicts in the Mid-East or Central America or Asia increase the possibility of a widening spiral that could draw us into nuclear war. A rogue state with chemical, and biological weapon capability can end the world as we know it. Despite our affluence, hunger and poverty thrive all around us. From South Africa to South America to the South Bronx, the despair and resentment of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised become more bitter. Over thirty years ago, Albert Einstein looked at the wonders and terrors of this age and asked the most fundamental question. "How is it possible," he said, "that this culture-loving era could be so monstrously callous and amoral? How is it conceivable that all our lauded technological progress - our very civilization- should become like an axe in the hands of the pathological criminal?" Einstein's question still haunts us. And despite the best efforts of politicians and theologians and philosophers, the answer - or answers - still elude us.

I can not provide a higher wisdom than these leaders and thinkers. But I can suggest where the search for that answer ought to begin. Let me suggest that our hope for reconciling our material abundance and our moral responsibilities - for using our technology not to oppress and destroy human life but to elevate and support it - begins here. The hope is that the work of the Alexia Foundation for World Peace will help us see the world as it really is, in all its complexity and diversity. That it will free us from the tunnel vision that is at the root of so many of the problems we face.

Maybe the best way to sum up those problems is with a story about Yogi Berra, when he was at the end of his career and playing right field for the Yankees. Sometime in the middle of the game, two perfectly naked fans ran across the outfield. The cameras cut away before the TV audience could catch a glimpse. So, when Yogi got home, his wife asked him whether the naked people on the field had been men or women. Yogi thought a moment, then said. "I couldn't tell. They were wearing bags over their heads." The world is filled with people who fail to see all they should see, who - a little bit like Yogi - see only part of reality. There are young people rising to success so fast they don't notice the people their age who are trapped in ghettoes and slums, surrounded by drugs and violence and hopelessness. There are business leaders so dedicated to the bottom line they can't find time to worry about those who don't have the skills or education to compete. There are intellectuals so absorbed in abstractions they can't see the homeless people sleeping in the doorways of their libraries. There are political leaders who tell us the best thing we can do for the poor is to pursue our own good fortune and hope some of it trickles down to the needy.

It's all wrong. We need to get it right. And it is not a matter of just proclaiming our own moral outrage. It has to be more than a gesture. The world will little note or remember a momentary demonstration of our concern. What it will remember are the ideas we translate into reality through the sheer force of commitments. What it will remember is the work we do to banish prejudices, to foster peaceful change, healing the divisions that threaten us with extinction. The world cries out for that work. That work is here.

In the 14 years since our daughter, Alexia, a photojournalism student, was tragically caught in the web of international terrorism, my faith was shaken to its core and then reborn, my family's future seemed doomed to desolation and has been renewed, my intellectual energy evaporated and then reinvigorated into political and social activism, and my American idealism was lost forever but replaced by a commitment to effect change. Repeatedly, I testified in front of Congressional Committees imploring Senators and Congressmen to implement and strictly enforce the 60 aviation security improvement recommendations and strive for a global policy on terrorism because it was only a matter of time, I told them, before the terrorists would reach American soil. On September 11th it happened. Bits of intelligence without a connecting framework. Credible threats shared within the government but not with the public. An airliner turned into an instrument of mass murder. The chilling parallel between Pan Am 103 and September 11th had been tragically drawn.

Now more than ever we must direct our energies to eradicating the cause of these violent acts of hatred. We need to raise the collective conscience of every man and woman on this planet toward the importance of guarding the institutions that bind together nations and the Earth. Terrorism, a growing global plague, is in all its forms the mortal enemy of everyone on earth. Terrorism attacks the rule of law by defying law itself. It shreds the gentle fabric of faith that holds together vastly diverse people in mutual recognition of their deep and common need for security. Every new horror dramatizes this obvious truth: however imperfect governments are and may always be, for free agents to take mortal warfare into their private hands is to lay bombs at the very foundations of society.

So today - and tomorrow and long after - there is one vital moral duty that can and must be served by every sane person grieved or angered by the slaughter of innocents. That is to resolve to use every available ounce of persuasion and every possible breath to condemn terrorism in all its forms. And then to take that resolve to every political and personal involvement that carries influence. To give nourishment, however passive, to terrorism and to license terrorism as a legitimate form of human behavior is a blood blasphemy against civilization itself.

Adlai Stevenson, one of the great thinkers in our history once said, "Action for action's sake is the last resort of mentally and morally exhausted men. The free nations must never tire in their search for peace. They must always be ready to sit down at the conference table, insisting only that any agreement conform to the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations. We must seek patiently and tirelessly for the rule of law among nations. That law has been written. It is the charter of the United Nations. It remains for every nation to respect it. That is the goal." You might be thinking right now that it is easy for me to become so passionate about the world body politic. That for me, it has become a cause celebre. Yes, that is true because we are a family so personally affected by an act of terrorism. "Well," you might be saying, "you have a reason but it does not affect me." September 11th shocked us into realizing that it can happen to any of us, at anytime, in any place. The impending conflict in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the India-Pakistan upheaval and the imbalance on the Korean peninsula, all signal a deterioration of the world politic to the point of potential annihilation. It is incumbent upon us all, as individuals, as a nation and as a Foundation dedicated to world peace to be in the vanguard of working toward preserving the peace for the generations to come.

It is here, where we try to do that. It is here, where we have the desire to give voice to injustice, to give voice to history so that we remember it, to give voice to cultural differences so as to promote understanding. We are few in this room. Yet, we have a noble purpose. The road is arduous, the road is never ending but we must maintain the commitment to travel that road undaunted. The future is an unknown but an old Chinese proverb tells us that if one generation plants a tree, another gets the shade.