Foster Harmony

 It is, perhaps, because this tenet is foundational to Distilled Harmony - my “path to appropriate living,” - that I find it so dismal when life unfolds in ways that are totally oppositional to it. The fact that the teenage murderer who killed 10 people and wounded 3 others in Buffalo, NY was a delusional racist white supremacist advocate of the “great replacement theory” allowed me to briefly hide behind the “He is insane. A kid blinded by the violent rhetoric of hate that seems almost everywhere in the world today. A crazy kid, an exception to the norm.” Then I learn about the 68-year old ethnic Chinese man in Southern California who murdered 1 and wounded 5 others during an attack on a church that was motivated by his hatred of people of Taiwanese descent. Well, there goes the crazy white teenager excuse.  Maybe everyone “out there in Southern California is crazy.” Then on the next link I get the latest from the war in Ukraine - which seems to have done the seemingly impossible by drawing republicans and democrats together, or mostly. This war is OK. 

Perhaps I am foolish to continue to believe - as Anne Frank, Dr. King, Mahatma Ghandi, Albert Einstein - and others far wiser than I, that deep down where it really matters, people are kind, caring, and compassionate. But it is getting harder. I am most frustrated by the incredible arrogance and false piety of contemporary religious leaders. I know of no faith that advocates something other than their version of “treat people the way you would like to be treated.” But somehow there are always implied exceptions. “Oh, you meant them too? I don’t know that I can go that far. They are, well, just different. Strange, you know?”

To clarify. Foster Harmony means foster harmony with everyone. And it starts at a personal level. You need to try to avoid personal disagreements - which is really hard especially here in the midst of the Covid pandemic. I am of the age and with a medical history that causes my oncologist to strongly suggest that I continue to wear a mask and practice social distancing in public and especially around children. I try my best.  Still I have folks point out to me that “you don’t need that anymore.”  My response? “I think I feel a cold coming on.” Much easier to lie than launch into a mask-muffled explanation. 

But here is a strange, admittedly bizarre, thought that is beginning to seem more plausible.  I was watching a documentary the other night - Netflix, I think the title was Unacknowledged. Anyhow, the basic assertion was that we - Earthlings, for lack of a better descriptor - have been in both direct and indirect communication with other far more advanced civilizations for several decades at least. These “unacknowledged” contacts have not been acknowledged - according to the documentary- for a variety of political reasons. But the one that struck me as most plausible was the assertion that “they” believed that we were, as a species, too violent and unreliable to be trusted to interact with these other far more advanced and - I assume - evolved civilizations.

They would, I muse, read one of my posts:

“Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm. Well, of course. And why don’t you do that?”