We put labels on people and fight wars over them. If we truly want harmony, we have to get past the labels.
Everything that's love can't be fear, and everything that's fear can't be love. You're either in one or the other. Almost every time you turn on the television set, you're in fear. You get aligned with fear. When you're aligned with fear, instead of with God-consciousness, you just keep attracting more fear-more stuff to be afraid of, more shortages, revenge, anger, wars, killing, and disease.
With empathy you know in your heart that it's not a sign of weakness to attempt to understand that the people we call terrorists have placed the same label on us, and that the use of force will create a counter force, a never-ending saga of killing and hate. Ending war involves cultivating empathy in our policies and the love of God in our hearts. As the Native Americans reminded us: No tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves.
Woodrow Wilson was the president of the United States in 1920, and he was made a fool of - his wife almost divorced him - because he wouldn't support women's suffrage. He was president during World War I, but I look back upon him as a coward. Because he knew the right thing to do - the right of women to vote was an idea whose time had come a long time before then, when a lot of women were put into prison or persecuted because they fought for it.
The war in Iraq, specifically America's role of leadership in this war, is a painful invitation to ask ourselves what, if anything, we've learned from previous wars. I am revolted by the brutal killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people during any war. And I'm saddened by the apparent inability of human beings to find less violent solutions to conflict and terrorism.
We come from an abundant, endlessly providing, always forthcoming, always giving source. If we would just stay like that, if we would be forthcoming and giving and sharing and allowing, excluding no one, then it wouldn't be possible to have wars in the Middle East, or poverty in Africa, or any of these kinds of things.
