Healing our Divided Planet

Where We are Today This morning – February 18, 2016 – as I sipped my morning coffee and browsed the morning newspapers and the world news from my mobile phone, a number of events happening in our planet struck me. I had an insight: this will be the introduction to the book I am writing. The following is what I wrote afterwards on my laptop. Several news items this morning tell me a common tale: humankind has set up boundaries of all sorts and peoples all over the world are engaged in various processes of enforcing, ignoring, challenging, redrawing, bridging or removing them. Why Heal? The photograph of the dead body of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian boy, washed ashore in Turkey in September 2015 shocked the whole world. “Image of Drowned Syrian Boy Echoes around the World” announced a news article from The Wall Street Journal. Aylan was a Kurdish Syrian whose family was fleeing from their town of Kobani, the scene of fierce ground battles and airstrikes by US warplanes. He was the innocent victim of the many horrible divides and conflicts tearing Syrian society apart (Figure 0.1). Who is Responsible? The UNESCO Constitution started by saying that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” Since the Constitution was signed in 1945, wars and conflicts are still going on unabated. Little progress has been made in constructing defences of peace in the minds of men. Mental fences that divide people from each other continue to be taught and nurtured in children by parents and teachers around the globe. When I was in secondary school, I first heard the song entitled “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” when I saw the 1958 movie “South Pacific.” The famous Broadway playwrights Rodgers and Hammerstein were under pressure to remove that song but they resisted the pressure. It appeared that they intended the song to be a parody of the mis-education of children that has been happening all over the world even up to today. Here are the lyrics of the song: You've got to be taught To hate and fear, You've got to be taught From year to year, It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made And people whose skin is a different shade You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught before it's too late Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate You've got to be carefully taught. Like Kobani, our planet is a divided planet. Like Aylan, we are all victims of many divides, but unlike Aylan, many of us are not innocent victims. Many of us harbor various mental fences and concepts that shape our behavior towards other people. We bear part of the responsibility for healing our divided planet because these divides arise from those mental fences fortified inside the heads of each of us since we were children.