It is so easy to lose our ideals to another. To have our dream of who and what we aspire to become taken by those that would play on our fears of loss and our sense of vulnerability is the main risk we take when we don't continuously reexamine the integrity of our values and our purpose in life. Doing so is hard work. It requires introspection, it requires that we be willing to challenge what we grew up "knowing", it sometimes requires a journey into the "dark night of the soul" as written about by St. John of the Cross - a place where all is questioned.
As a people, as a country, and as a society, I worry that today we are on the verge of losing much. America was founded on ideals of freedom, tolerance and equality. In the eyes of the Founding Fathers, no person was beyond the law of the land and no person was to be denied the law of the land. America was settled by people fleeing religious and economic persecution and today those that have a different god - spiritual or secular - are at the very least looked on as untrustworthy and at the very worst persecuted by being denied the due process of the laws of the land. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right when he said that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". Roosevelt went on later in the same inagural speech of 1933 to say "In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy
of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and,
because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who
respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in
and with a world of neighbors." With politicians today devising election strategies based on fear that separate us as a people into blue states and red states, conservatives and liberals, it becomes a challenge to respect the whole. It becomes easy to fear the "other side".
When fear becomes our dominant mood - as an individual and as a people - much is likely to be lost. Fear is not created by the absence of safety. Fear is created in the absence of love. The opposite of love is not hate. It is fear masking as hate. One of the most effective ways to not be influenced by the fear generated by others is to know myself - to know ourselves as a people - in such a deep and intimate way that I recognize one of the core truths taught by all of the great religions and philosophies of the world - we are all connected and that to harm another is to harm myself.
