“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” – Robert F. Kennedy
I am proud to be a part of a generation full of people wanting to make a real difference in the world. I see that desire every day.
I see it in the hundreds of thousands of Stop Hunger Now volunteers who package meals for hungry school children around the world. I see it in those walking for a cure to cancer. I see it in the millions of dollars donated to charities every year.
Few of us will have the greatness that our actions make the history books. Yet Kennedy is right when he says that all of us working together can change the world.
Every one of us can make a real and a lasting difference in the lives of others. Every one of us can play a vital role in changing our world into a better, safer, and more compassionate place.
Working together we can end hunger in our lifetime. We can clean up the environment.
Working together we can do more than bending history. We can rewrite history. We can change the world forever.
The earth was established to be in common for all, rich and poor….Nature makes no distinctions among us at our birth, and none at our death. All alike she creates us, all alike she seals us in the tomb. Who can tell the dead apart? Open up the graves, and, if you can, tell which was a rich man. – Saint Ambrose
Saint Ambrose is right, isn’t he? Our planet is home to all of us. All of us are born, live our lives and then die. In the end our socio-economic status makes absolutely no difference.
The shame is that during our brief sojourn on this blessed sphere we do our best to magnify every possible distinction between us. It’s a shame because we are all one family.
Instead of loving each other as we have been loved, we all “have to have someone we can look down on” as the saying goes. We have completely lost sight of the fact we are all connected. And I am not just talking about our social, economic and ethnic distinctions. We have forgotten that all of humanity is one and every single one of us is integrally connected to this wonderful planet.
Everything is connected, and all of us are part of an exquisite interwoven whole that is earth. How sad it is that we no longer understand that. We allow and take part in destruction of each other and our environment with absolutely no conscious thought.
That’s a damned shame. Rich or poor, what does it matter?
So open up the graves. Maybe it’s not too late.
In 1976, Shridath S. Ramphal, who was the Commonwealth Secretary-General of Guyana, wrote:
Each element of our current concerns–energy, population, the environment, food supply–confirms the interrelatedness of the human condition and the planetary convergence of our national destinies. It is not now so much the moral perception that we are our brother’s keeper, but the practical reality that each brother is our keeper. National self-interest demands an international restructuring that acknowledges the reality of our human condition.
Now, 33 years later, his words are even more true than when they were first penned. We will never end hunger until we understand and accept that we are one global community. Achieving a world without hunger requires nothing less.
Achieving genuine community will demand more of us than any other endeavor, but it is surely worth the struggle. Our future depends on it.
