the World's Mightiest Swords
Every single thing humans invent is susceptible to being transformed into a sword. If necessary, a plowshare can be beaten into a sword by a skilled swordsmith, even though it's easier to begin with new metal. Consider the invention of cannon. Founders at the end of the Middle Ages crafted the first bronze "bombards" out of church bells turned upside down and filled with stones and gunpowder. Much earlier, human ingenuity guided by tradition allowed hundreds of generations of craftsmen to transform the technology of flintknapping into the art of forging superbly balanced killing machines made from the finest Damascus steel.
The standards by which soldiers properly draw swords from their scabbards and later sheathe them and put them away for safekeeping are molded by those ancient pens of honor and prestige and the more modern pens of duty and law embedded within our society's mores. For instance, Americans during the Revolutionary War wondered if they were doing the right thing by lifting the sword against Great Britain to win American independence.
On Christmas Day in Valley Forge, George Washington ordered his army to listen as their officers read them excerpts from Thomas Paine's essay, "Common Sense." Years later, soldiers remembered how they wept when they heard, "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stand it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." Later that night, the Americans defeated the Hessians occupying Trenton. The victory is considered one of the major turning points in the war.
A later generation of Americans wondered about all the fuss made by some over the existence of slavery. The smaller cruelties of day-to-day life on the plantation and the greater cruelty of forcing human beings to work for the rest of their lives without choice or recompense escaped them until they read Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Stowe's work created such consternation that when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he is said to have greeted her with the words: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"
September 11 demonstrated in horrific fashion how human beings bent upon destruction can use the pens of religious fanaticism combined with the pens of technological scheming to kill thousands of Americans, the worst catastrophe inflicted with malice within the shores of our nation since the Civil War. It took the coldly calculated use of pens to do the deadly planning needed by terrorists to turn our own jetliners with passengers and fully loaded fuel tanks into swords of horrifying destructive capacity by slamming them into our buildings at 550 miles per hour. And in turn, the hot fury of the American people screamed through the scrawls of millions of "pens" on talk shows and the Internet, demanding our soldiers pick up the swords fashioned for them by the pens of scientists and engineers and use them to destroy those who would destroy us.
This co-evolution of swords and pens will not end with our war against terrorism. Consider the work of a man named Eric Drexler. His book, "Engines of Creation," revealed the potential for the development of very small tools and swords built up out of individual atoms and molecules by machines so small they measure in billionths of a meter--nanometers, hence nanotechnology. Imagine these tiny swords wafting their way through caves unseen. Destroying enemy weaponry by snipping their chemical bonds and "eating" them before the enemy notices anything amiss. Sniffing out suicide bombers' hidden deadly cargo. Shredding terrorists' encampments. Every step guided by the "pens" of cleverly programmed nanocomputers.
Our fury cools to iron resolution. We will have protection. We will have justice. And so, our mightiest pens shall ever sculpt the world's mightiest swords.