It appears the Memorial Day Weekend is upon us a week early this year. With all national holiday observances now falling on Monday, May 25 will mark the final Monday of this year’s “merry month of May.”
Many military services, honorariums and parades will highlight the week in honor of our nation’s fallen veterans for whom the holiday was originated. Through the years, however, other loved ones, family members, friends and associates have been increasingly added to address a broader range of grief, pain, or to relieve ever widening cycles of anxiety.
“The winds of despair are alas blowing from every direction,” we read from a Baha’i pamphlet Beyond National Sovereignty, “and the strife that divideth and afflicteth the human race is daily increasing. The signs of convulsion and chaos (natural and societal) can now be discerned in as much as the prevailing order appeareth to be lamentably defective…The spread of terrorism redefines war- (as also the sophistication of warfare)! How does a nation strike back when the enemy is not another nation but a formless group that blends into the population?”
Certainly not by attacking and waging war on nations within which such malignancies are festering–our own being among them.
While on a brief 4-day visit to Israel a few years back (during the George W. Administration) I was watching the news when one scene showed crowds in the street bearing banners that read (in English), “Don’t make NEW terrorists trying to get rid of terrorism!” We may need a few of those waving in Washington.
A fundamental spiritual redirection is required!–redirection and unification of existing powerful spiritual impetus!
Throughout the nation and the world there is astir a new wave toward rallying interfaith gatherings to maximize spiritual strength weakened only by division, interpretation and increasing multiplicity. Observe how mankind for thousands of years has been ruled by a small minority with the simple theory, “divide and conquer.” The same theory given by Willie Lynch in 1712 to the new slave holders along the banks of the James River in Virginia in this nation’s infancy. Identify their differences ªage, skin color, intelligence, size, sex, status, residency, etc.; magnify them; ad fear, distrust, envy then pit them against one another. “I guarantee that, if installed correctly, you can control them for at least 300 years, if not for thousands!”
Identifying the slaves and slave masters on today’s high tech societal and political plantation however, is not as easy as black and white. Technology, social media and any combination of differences can be (and are being) easily pit against one another for the benefit of a few. But how can any mushroom stand alone after the stem is cut from beneath it?
Diversity in the human family should be the cause of harmony as in music where many different notes blend together to make a perfect chord. If love and agreement are manifest in a single family that family will advance, become illumined and spiritual. But if enmity and hatred exist within it, destruction and dispersion are inevitable. The same is true of the people of a nation or of humanity itself in the aggregate. (Investigate!1-800-22-unite)
