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I am standing on a corner in a foreign land, just watching people go by. Some look at me. After I have been here for a little while, some start to take an interest in me. These people hate my country. My country has been attacking their neighbors and imposing economic hardships on their country. No one can blame them for being mad at my country. Some would take the opportunity to kill anyone from my country. So I am giving them the opportunity. Here I am, occupying their corner, demonstrating quietly what it will take for us to have peace on Earth. A man comes up to me and looks me in the eye for a moment. Then he slaps me. looks at me for few more seconds, and walks away. He gets into a car and his friend drives them away. A few people have gathered in front of me. One has a piece of broken cement about the size of a jagged egg. Suddenly he throws it at me hard and fast. I barely lean out of the path of the rock in time, and it misses. A man comes at me from the side with a knife. I move, twist and disarm him, causing the knife to fall to the ground and him to move away a little by his own inertia. I go back to standing on the corner. But he is really pissed now. Another man about 20 yards away pulls a gun and fires at me. I am not so lucky this time. I move, but it nicks me in the side. He could shoot again, but he doesn't. I don't know why. Someone throws something at me from behind. It feels like a small, sharp rock. When it hits the ground, I hear it break. Glass. Another cut. I am surrounded. People are looking at me, some are very angry and saying something in their language. I don't know the language, so I remain quiet. A moment later, a man in a hurry comes through the crowd and walks up to me. He has no weapon in his hands. He raises his hand, takes hold of my arm and in a heavy accent says, "Come with me." The small crowd parts, barely and lets us through, him towing me along. I don't know who he is, but he has probably saved my life. He pushes me into a cab, says something to the cab driver, closes the door and steps away. The cab immediately drives me away. I am bleeding my foreign blood in his car. ... The effects of generations of people being negligent, apathetic, mean, inconsiderate and greedy has caused generations of people in this country to hate my country. To reverse the effect will take more generations. The early generations of people in my country committed genocide against the indigenous people who lived there before them. Those people were stone age, had no utility metal working at all. Hammering bits of copper and gold into jewelry and decoration was all the metal working they had. They did not even have the wheel. I have limited empathy in a real time social interaction. I figure out how people felt to a greater degree after the interaction, if I can. But I am compassionate, and understand these hurts enough to know... we must change. Our people have learned from previous generations to be callous, to not feel, to not care how they are affecting other people in far away lands. They want what they want, and they want it now! And it's just too bad if the people in the far away lands can't have it. Because we are taking it from them. They should have "#@$&!" What? They should work harder, start a business, build something. No, we won't do business with them. But we will take their natural resources and poison their homeland in the process. Their one saving grace means nothing right now. And that is that we are like the Romans. We are poisoning ourselves at a phenomenal rate. We are at a turning point in our country, heading for the ghetto. Our whole country at every level is deteriorating, and we will become too weak to be a major economic or military player in the world, some day. In the mean time, our military pisses on their dead corpses, drops bombs on their neighbors, and sometimes even their houses, because their neighbors are hiding there, trying not to die, trying to get their freedom back. If they would just quit fighting so much, we could deteriorate faster. In the end all the stuff that matters is not stuff at all. They are ideas and feelings. Kindness, truth, honesty, wisdom, understanding, knowledge, Love. These are what matter. Be kind and honest, gain wisdom, knowledge and understanding and give Love away for 500 years, and the Earth, our home, will be so beautiful, that we in our current state would not be able to describe it. It would be overwhelming. Our best poets and artists would have difficulty expressing the incredible beauty. And even if they could, who would really understand? It must be experienced. Because the people would be so practiced, with deeply felt Love for all life, all creatures and all people, they would create more life, more art, more beauty. The artists would create big beautiful art within nature that would take on a life all it's own, becoming even more beautiful as it grew. The wise would give their wisdom away, since to keep it would be most unwise. Wisdom is like a seed. You plant it, and it will grow in the minds and hearts of other people. And they will spread it in all that they think, say and do. Their effect on their families, communities and the world would all be good, increasing the health of all the life on Earth. -- Daemon Bernstein |