Someone landing on Earth for the first time might find themselves wondering why humanity seems bent on destroying itself from within…and they’d have an excellent point. Look around, and it doesn’t take long to see what’s providing the power driving us to wherever it is we’re heading. Anger, strife, conflict, hatred- all these seem to be part and parcel of the human experience, which seems exceedingly sad considering the alternative is safer, easier, and far more pleasant. Best of all, love doesn’t cost anything. Love isn’t a an expense, it’s an investment, which the truly wise recognize.
Sadly, it seems very few truly wise people trodding call this Earth home. When a zealot can behead a man or burn someone to death in a cage over religion, you know the power of hate has been embraced as superior to that of love. When masked gunmen can massacre 12 innocents over (real or perceived) insults to their religion, hatred has surpassed love. When a man can shoot a doctor in the vestibule of his church because he believe the doctor to be worthy only of death, evil has triumphed over good.
You could be forgiven for suspecting I’m going to turn this into a screed about the evils of religion, but that’s not what this is about for me. Religion can be part of the solution, even as so many have managed to turn into the problem. It’s about people deciding that we’re better together, that if we don’t pull together, we will surely perish separately. One of the things living overseas taught me is that people are far more similar than different. We may speak different languages and hew to different cultural traditions, but we all put our pants on the same way. We all want to live in a safe and secure world in which we can raise our children to dream and be whatever they want to be.
Ultimately, we all have a common interest in meeting and defeating those who spread hatred, strife, and destruction. Those things work against what any sane, reasonable human being would hope for. Yes, there are those who strive for power for their own selfish ends. Humanity being what it is that’s unlikely to change…but it doesn’t have to mean mean that those of us who wish for something different can’t begin pulling in that direction.
Mahatma Gandhi brought down the British Raj without firing a shot, so there’s precedent for taking direct action in order to create a better world. With all the forces working against that, it’s easy to wonder if humanity has it within itself to demand change and then work to ensure it happens.
This is a case where I’d love nothing more than to be proven wrong, that it can be proven we can live in a world without ISIS/ISIL, al-Qaeda, radical Islam, radical Christianity, and radicalism in general. I hope to live to see the day when we’ll finally figure it out and recognize that we’ve more in common than our differences.
