Interconnectedness

I was talking to a friend last week about relationships. Not just relationships between friends, lovers and family; relationships between me and the guy driving the car next to me. Six degrees of separation.

When you hear about signs of the Apocalypse, you hear about global currency or the earth united behind a global leader. Those are two things that I can't see happening anytime soon. Yet, I am mystified. Why would a common global interest be a bad thing? When I think about the potential for an apocalypse, I think about people hurting each other. Murder, sexual assaults, child abuse, these are signs of the apocalypse to me. These are things that are happening RIGHT NOW.

A sign of the apocalypse is certainly not the world united for the betterment of its people as a whole.

We share the earth. A butterfly here causes a monsoon over there. Leave the water running while you brush your teeth and you're diminishing the water supply for the rest of the world. The earth doesn't belong to one person, one country or one race of human being. We share it and it behooves us to treat it as such.

There are so many individual groups all fighting for some purpose. There are LGBT rights, women's rights, rights for people of color, rights for fathers, the right to choose, religious freedom. Everyone is fighting for a "right" of some kind. Everyone of them is fighting for one thing. The right and the freedom to be free and allowed to live as they choose. These are inalienable rights and rights entitled to each and every person, solely based on their membership in the human race.

Of course I am not advocating the exploitation of another because someone feels they have a "right". That is a semantic argument and one made by someone who just likes to start trouble. Each person's rights end quite clearly when they infringe upon the rights of another person. We all understand that intellectually.

I also don't believe that someone can be denied a right because of someone else's belief system. I find it amazing that we have no tangible proof of a god. Excepting the arguments made by each religion to affirm its validity and in my opinion that is a biased argument. Yet every day, someone on this planet deprives another of his/her rights because of a belief in something that cannot be proven or seen.

In the future, I will drive more cautiously. I will behave more courteously. I will treat my brothers and sisters who are also children of the same mother (our Mother Earth) in kind. With love. Because that is my only responsibility. Not to judge, not to steal, cause pain to or treat with hate. I will share and hope they will share alike. I know then that I am living my interconnectedness.