When I was in school I studied about man’s inhumanity to man. Wars, crime, poverty - we can look around our world and see these things everywhere on our planet.

Yet what is it that I can do– after all what can one person do about the truly awful things of “life”? Iraq, Africa, what is it that we, I, can do? As I look around me I think I can come up with something. Not big, but even big things start small.

I can be kinder.
I can have more patience.
I can think about another and help them in some way.
I can be honest with myself.

As Eleanor Roosevelt, the chief architect of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, said “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen in any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works….Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”* And so it truly is in our own lives. We are the architects of ourselves, and must be the one to do something about it.

L. Ron Hubbard wrote in the article What is Greatness:

“The real lesson is to learn to love.

He who would walk scatheless through his days must learn this.

Never use what is done to one as a basis for hatred. Never desire revenge.

It requires real strength to love man. And to love him despite all invitations to do otherwise, all provocations and all reasons why one should not.

Happiness and strength endure only in the absence of hate. To hate alone is the road to disaster. To love is the road to strength. To love in spite of all is the secret of greatness. And may very well be the greatest secret in this universe.”*

As the year draws to an end and the New Year is about to start, I challenge you to decide to do something, anything creative or constructive, about yourself, the family, neighborhood or town around you. Lets see what we can do.

* excerpts from What is Greatness? L. Ron Hubbard
* excerpts Eleanor Roosevelt, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nation in 1948