Change the World?

If you watch the news from the mass media channels you'll see a world in destruction. All the bad things they choose to show are magnified so a naive viewer sees the world through a tainted lense. Now I'm not saying evil shouldn't be exposed, but there are far greater evils in the world than what they show. I have a future post coming that will expose one of them.

What I'm trying to say, despite the evils of the world, the good outweighs it a hundred fold. People are mostly good. That's my experience. If I never ventured out I would accept the news narrative and be afraid to go on any adventures. Dangers lurk, right?

I'm happy to report the world I've seen is one of kind people willing to embrace the stranger to help him if he needs help. To have fellowship with him even though he is strange to them and holds different beliefs.

What do I have in common with the people of the Islam faith?

At face value you may say nothing at all. We are such different people, right? But I was wholly embraced by them in my encounters.

We all hold the same basic values. We want to be happy in life. We want to be accepted by others. We value our families. Many believe in some kind of divine guidance in which they have faith.

But too many people want to change the world. They want the world to conform to their belief system and it must be exactly as they see the world. There is an intolerance for any deviation or diversity. That's what's led to the big rift in our country (USA). The conservatives want the liberals to conform and the liberals, even though they claim to embrace diversity, has little tolerance for others with dissimilar points of view.

People want to change the world. But they can't. They'll try, just like this dung beetle:

But in the end, like this beetle, they just end up with a big ball of crap.

I've learned something in my older age through travel. There's no need to change the world. It's not possible nor important. What's important is we change ourselves. If we can do that, the world automatically becomes a better place.

We can do this by accepting the diversity that's around us. Open our minds to other things. All people hold their beliefs for a reason. We are all a product of our environments.

If we can simply learn a degree of tolerance, maybe in a way we do change the world, but just in a different way than most try.