To the editor:

Fifty-nine years ago, near the end of the second world war within 25 years, the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco by delegates from 50 countries. The charter, written and promoted by the United States, has been called “one of our greatest creations.” The delegates, realizing that civilization could not survive another world war, tried to provide ways to maintain peace and to remove the causes of war.

Today, representatives of 191 countries meet each year. In spite of serious limitations, the extensive U.N. system has made our world a more humane place. Recently, the greatest opposition to treaties benefiting all mankind has come, sadly, from the United States.

What has happened to the United States? While peoples all over the world look to our Constitution and to the United Nations with hope and embrace our ideals, we elect and support governments that repudiate both our own ideals and those of the United Nations. Now, our own laws and international laws are regularly broken. Truth is not held in high regard and is not much used, science is disregarded or subverted, secrecy is the rule, freedom of the press is discouraged. People are mostly irrelevant, money is everything.

Our democracy is seriously threatened. The development of even more nuclear weapons, which should be unthinkable, is again a threat — from the United States! As if the destruction of our land, water and other resources weren’t enough already to destroy our civilization!

Neither the continuation of democracy nor of civilization is assured.

Doris S. Dort,

Lawrence