Dear Editor,
My New Year’s wish is unfortunately an impossibly idealistic one: that people and societies across the world adopt a simple guiding principle that would encourage us to finally transcend our obsession with emphasizing and promoting our religious, ideological, cultural and political differences and come together with mutual respect and common cause: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Imagine turning on the news and hearing reports about nothing but successful collective and collaborative efforts to solve the crises all human beings face instead of being continually assaulted by yet more news about conflicts, violence, wars and atrocities that are all precipitated by our need to differentiate and separate ourselves from each other - by our deeply entrenched need to prove that our belief system, our country, our culture, our religion, our political point-of-view is superior to all others.
Impossibly idealistic wish?
Well, both thousands of years of human history and what is happening in the world today indicate that it is.
But, in any case, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a worthy ideal even if we are not collectively ready, willing or able to universally adopt it as the only possible way of bringing all people together in harmony and realizing our full potential as a species.
Ray Arnold
Richmond
