Turning Unity of Purpose into Unity of Action
Look, all of us (well almost all of us) want to solve the world’s problems - to end this scary economic crisis, to find cheap clean energy, and to stop global warming before this lovely earth becomes un-inhabitable. We all want wars to end, hunger, disease to disappear, and poverty to become a thing of the past.
Agreed?
So how do we do it?
The experts are telling us we do it together, or we don’t do it. It’s becoming increasingly clear in these first moments of the 3rd millennium that as Al Gore says, impossible though it may seem, we need to “start making decisions as a species” if we are going to survive.
In other words, just to rub the reality in a little bit, if we don’t quickly learn how to make truly unified actions, we’re pretty much doomed. We, or the people we love (our descendants), are either going to fry or get nuked or shot or starved - or meet some other equally horrible fate.
Unite (can’t we all just get along) or die.
In more polite or obscure language, this is what we are being told by our top economists, scientists and other experts on the human condition. Yet most of us are muddling through this holiday season with our heads firmly in the sand. It’s all too much to think about. And besides, what can one person or one family do?
Plenty.
We can seize the very best (and sadly most under-utilized) tool for peace and unity that we’ve got, one that’s guaranteed to help us learn to get along. This tool was created by the United Nations in 1999, endorsed by the U.S. Congress in 2000 (The Late Senator Paul Wellstone gets credit for that). It was adopted again by the U.S. Congress in 2006. Rep. John Conyers, Senator Harry Reid, and Senator Daniel Inouye are just a few of the U.S. Congressmen who have come out in support of this powerful tool. It is praised by 24 heads of state, and innumerable ambassadors including recent support of the Chinese, the British, and many others.
What is this tool? It’s called Global Family Day.
Global Family day is day of peace and sharing for all faiths, cultures, races, nationalities and economic classes. Celebrated each year on Jan 1, the day serves as a platform from which to build global traditions which can in turn help us overcome the challenges of poverty, hunger and violence which face our global family in century ahead.
Problem is, we’ve got exactly 11 days to tell the entire world about it - and to change people’s plans for the first day of the new year.
Instead of just lying around yawning, over-eating or gluing yourself to the tube, we are asking everybody in the world, every member of our global family to start a couple of new traditions in honor of Global Family Day.
1. Make a Promise (or two)to the World
What are you willing to do during 2009 to help the global family. Once you’ve made your promise, write it down. Share it with your personal family, share it with your friends and most important, share it with the world by posting it in the comment section below.
2. Dedicate a Meal
Enjoy a specially dedicated meal with your family, friends, foes, neighbors or whoever or reach out to someone somewhere else in the world who doesn’t think like you (families, as you well know, are never in perfect harmony).
Then as the US Congress asked you to do in 2000, match the cost of this special New Year’s Meal with a gift to the hungry. Donate to the World Food Program, or to a neighbor in need down the street. It doesn’t matter.
3) As you go out into the world in the New Year, look around and say to yourself, “We are family. We are all family regardless of how we look or how we are currently acting.”
Eden may never be achievable, but you know something, unless the scientists are wrong, there’s still time. By acting today and celebrating Global Family Day, we can still come darn close.
