ME and Ophelia

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE RECIPIENT DESMOND TUTU
Sends a message to us all

The following excerpt brought tears to my eyes as I thought of our top man, the great British physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and how he voluntarily gave up a fortune so that the World Wide Web could freely belong to us, the people.

He would be pleased to see here how it is being used. I shall email a copy of this post to the Father of the Internet, Vinton G Cerf.

Desmond Tutu, former Archbishop of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize recipient sent the following message to be posted on the Internet at the Passion of the Present blog and read at the rally in support of Sudan tomorrow at Harvard in Cambridge, MA:

Let us not say we did not know.

We know and we must do something.

Let us speak up and speak out against the atrocities in Darfur.

Those dying are God’s children.

They are our sisters and brothers. Let us act now before it is too late.

God bless you for caring.

We defeated apartheid because the world cared and acted.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
June 7, 2004

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Excerpt from the Passion of the Present blog, June 7, 2004:

The story behind this message speaks to both the speed of the web and the importance of face-to-face and voice meetings. Archbishop Tutu and Joanne are both involved in another project on peace in the Middle East and North Africa. Joanne has been trying to contact him by email for some days to help out on the Sudan crisis. She has been unsuccessful due to a problem in the email address. This morning at 5:00 AM she remembered she had dinner with the current archbishop of South Africa a couple of years ago. This stimulated an early morning dig for his card followed by a phone call to South Africa. The upshot is that his assistant answered and was wonderfully gracious and helpful (“of course we can help, but isn’t it late for you there in the US? “). She linked Joanne immediately with Archbishop Tutu’s assistant—and a few hours later Archbishop Tutu offered the message above.