The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

by John McCain

it is a moral failure to believe tyranny and injustice are the inevitable tragedies of man’s fallen nature, that there are some places in the world that will not change or aren’t worth the effort to make better. They can be changed. They have been. And not only by force of arms as with Germany or Japan, but peacefully with international pressure and support. Every independent democratic country in the world once had a government less just and accountable, whether it was monarchical, dictatorial, or imperial. Progress toward a freer, more just world is the history of the world. Change doesn’t always proceed as quickly as we want it to, but it comes. We were once the world’s only democratic republic and now we’re one of more than a hundred. The ranks of free nations have swelled thanks in large part to the example, leadership, and support of the United States. And thanks to all those people and organizations in every corner of the world, the philosophers, the politicians, the activists, and the ordinary decent men and women who throughout history have not let injustice stand without trying to right it.