Dealing With Sociopolitical World Changes

Your Dec. 18 World Report is a sad and frightening reading. Its emphasis on each ethnic, national and religious grouping arguing “my family” first is a basic human reaction, but forgotten is the past on how families survived. It took a sharing with family and neighbors to feed, clothe and house those who belonged to the greater “connecting” body, the tribe. And the tribes never lived in peace without making either war or an accommodation. Only the latter allowed growth and development.

Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye can blind the world.” Only the “torch” of liberty and freedom can end the groping in darkness that such blindness produces.

Recently, we learned the Hubble telescope in space, in its limited way, was still able to peer 2 billion light years away to our beginning. That darkness exploded and created light. There is a lesson for us to ponder and accept. Light is needed for us to see each other, and accept the differences.

I wondered, when I read what the Hubble telescope pictured, why is that we can peer only into the past. Is it possible that light years back in time blinds us to what may be existing at this very moment in our lives, in some distant future, and makes it impossible to focus on it?

May we be guided by a future based on the mutuality of all that unites every difference into yet but one, for we are all basically the same in form and frame.

The Hubble telescope also pictures darkness we cannot peer into, but may be the place where we disappear forever, never to escape to shine brightly in the firmament that surrounds us.

In a world that now knows how to harness nuclear power, surely the question we have to answer, and can answer, is what light we will produce today for those in the distant future, who may be seeing, in the Hubble telescope they are using, today’s past, and all that happens with each reading of the moment?

HYMAN H. HAVES

Pacific Palisades