You have no doubt read many quotations and adages repeated in these Turtle Talk editorials over the past 45 years and will continue to do so as repetition is the key to memorization and perfection. Only recently did we remind readers that the world’s most precious resources are neither mineral nor rare gems, but children in whose hands the destiny of the nations an the world must inevitably fall.
“All children are born pure and unsullied into the world” we read in the Baha’i Holy Writings, “as perfect mirrors on which no dust has fallen,” with their delicate systems physically and psychologically addicted to pure milk and honey. From the time of birth, however they are fed, drop by drop, the poisons of society until they at very early stages become addicted to poison.
Among society’s innumerable poisons we find selfishness, which can inject its poisonous venom in so many ways often too subtle to be detected even by the one secreting it. On this subject alone could be and have been written volumes, from reasons for having children to begin with in our modern society of misplaced priorities to vying for favor among one and even two-parent families to any number of unimaginable reasons that leave little room for the ever widening requisite for tender loving care from prenatal to the end of life’s journey. This insidious poison begets a succession of others including greed, envy, jealousy, insensitivity, hate and all of its malevolent qualities and characteristics.
In our humble estimation, however one of modern society’s most devastating poisons is that of competition, instilled in infants and children at earliest stages in various seemingly innocent “friendly” forms. No one wants to be a loser at any age and those of tender years psychologically take it very personally. As there can be only one winner in most competitions it has taken a rash of recent television shows to shine light on and give additional hope to increasing numbers of talented people of all ages who would otherwise remain unheard of. This poisonous competitive mentality has for centuries pit parent against parent, siblings and other family members, races, religions, men and nations. How awkward in today’s increasingly interdependent society, the growing realization of the imperative need for cooperation in every level of society starting from infancy as the infancy of the human races.
In infancy mankind was intellectually scientifically and technologically weak but spiritually strong, a condition that exists even today in some rural and underdeveloped portions of the world. However as mankind matures, the opposite occurs. Must we be returned to an involuntary mere “state of survival” due to the poisons we have become addicted to rather than demonstrate voluntary cooperation? With the quantum leap in today’s knowledge of the arts, science and technology, mankind is quite capable of fulfilling the Lord’s Prayer of “Thy Kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven – except for voluntary omission of the primary part, “…Thy Will (not ours) be done.”
For the myriad of poisons throughout this beautiful world, both natural and man contrived, there have always been and continue to be antidotes provided by the Creator of it all. Investigate!
