Playing for the same team...

For today's post I would like to defer to Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth, because I don't think there is any way I could say what I am feeling today as well as he says it. Take it away Mr. Tolle...

"These days you frequently hear the expression "the war against" this or that, and whenever I hear it I know that it is condemned to failure. There is the war against drugs, the war against crime, the war against terrorism, the war against cancer, the war against poverty, and so on. For example, despite the war against crime and drugs, there has been a dramatic increase in crime and drug-related offenses in the past 25 years. The war against disease has given us, among other things, antibiotics. At first they were spectacularly successful... now, many experts agree that... antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria will in all likelihood bring about a reemergence of those diseases and possibly epidemics.

War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as "war", your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it."

I wasn't at all upset about a physical war today, but instead the war that people create for us all with their hatefulness. And then, they turn around and wonder why there are problems in the world. It is directly because of people spreading their hatefulness that our problems exist. I intend to avoid that temptation at all costs. I will follow my loves, not my hates. I will plaster my car with bumper stickers about what I love, not what I hate. I will inspire people, not tear them down with negativity and purposeless meanness. It is not clever; it is not funny; it is harmful. To me, to those who hear it, and to the world at large.



Declaring war on life, down to the simplest thing- like hating Britney Spears for whatever perfectly logical reason- is another way people draw lines between each other. If it suddenly becomes so important to you to hate Britney Spears that you talk poorly about her whenever the subject comes up, or laugh when something negative happens to her, or tell jokes at her expense, or make fun of the people who do like her, you are spreading hatefulness and drawing lines. No matter how trivial the issue may seem. You are creating an us vs. them. You are causing the fissure that divides us. Us vs. them is just people vs. people. Both sides of the same team. (And no Britney Spears was not the basis for this post.)