Francy Williams recently wrote the following letter to the editor of the 11/23/2015 Frederick News Post entitled "Lessons Learned from WWII."

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I support our president’s response to recent events in Paris to go slow and not to rush in with a military response. Was a lesson learned from our country’s response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001 when we entered a 14 year war that is not over yet? I recently learned that there are 60 million displaced people/refugees today and there were 45 million refugees following World War II.

I grew up in on the campus of a Quaker School near Philadelphia, where my father taught physics. My mother was active in supporting a Quaker Girls School in Tokyo, Japan, by finding Americans who would go and teach English in the school for a year or two at a time.

Growing up during and after WWII, our family spent summers on my grandparents’ fruit farm near Media, Pennsylvania. Following the release of Japanese-Americans who had been interned in this country during the war, several families came to live on the farm while waiting to return to their vineyards and ranches in California. It was sad to learn how these Americans had been treated as a result of paranoia and fear of “the enemy.”

Today, it saddens me to hear elected officials and others featured in our news media reacting to recent acts of terror (i.e., in Paris) with fear, and the idea that a military response is first and right and that we should beware of people seeking asylum in our country. The idea of closing our doors to unfortunate people caught in the crossfire of military action runs so counter to the values by which I was raised.

I recently attended a lobbying effort in Washington, D.C., in support of Sen. Ben Cardin’s Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, which would permanently authorize the Atrocities Prevention Board and provide flexible spending through the Complex Crisis Fund to the USAID. The APB is a high-level working group coordinating U.S. agency efforts to foresee and address potential conflicts in hotspots around the world, and to use peace-building efforts to avert genocide and mass atrocities. Agencies share their knowledge and report on early warning signs of conflict. Sadly, the Complex Crises Fund is underfunded ($30 million). The Department of Defense gets $600 billion, when peace-building efforts get only $46 billion. Humanitarian aid workers are exhausted and lack resources to meet the needs. This year, the Complex Crisis Fund received over 100 requests that it was not able to fund.

It is time to fund peace building. I am heartened by Cardin’s proposal to make permanent the Atrocities Prevention Board and hope that policy and decision makers in government can be persuaded to spend more time and money on peace building and prevention of genocide and atrocities than on military response to conflict. Now is the time for calm compassionate action, for peaceful resolution of conflict, for attending to humanitarian needs of innocent people, and for bringing an end to ongoing and ever-growing atrocities.

by Frances Williams