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Hello, Network:

        It is clear that the 21st Century will be no less tumultuous than
its predecessor.  Almost certainly more so.  Does it really matter whether
the United States or Europe or India or China will occupy center stage?
Does it really matter if the modern world-system mutates into a new
configuration, empowering or impoverishing this segment of humankind or
that?  Should we re-orient or re-occident?

        I submit that any candid survey of world history will disclose
that centers of gravity shift from era to era, that conquistadores and
victims are of all colors and cultures, that guilt and innocence adhere to
all of us, that recriminations are in vain.

        What survives is a sense, broad, deep, world-historical, that our
kind--the human kind--must coalesce.  Our city is the Human City.  Our
homeland is Cosmopolis.  Our marketplace is the global bazaar.  Our
imminently common culture is woven of polychrome threads, each different,
but in the end much, mostly, the same.

        I appeal for concourse.  Convergence.  The abandonment of sterile
tribal identities for the sake of fertilizing interpenetrations.  We stand
in urgent need of a World Party of all women, all men, all citizens of
this planet, united in the quest for serious democracy, full equality,
love, peace, sharing, healing.

        We pledge allegiance to the Human City, one planet under the
watchful heavens, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.  In other
traditions the same pledge will be spoken otherwise.  The point is to
converge.

        Warren