“Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other.”

I write about unity a lot. This column is even called Light of Unity. There’s a reason for that, which has never been clearer as we enter 2024, a more divided community, country, and world than ever.

I find myself thinking back to the first article, published in January 2021 in the East Oregonian. We were in the height of the pandemic. Everything was canceled. The entire world was nearly a year into a restricted life. We all have issues about how things fell out, but it seems to me that one of the worst results was how disunified we had become by the end.

In our lives today, we are surrounded by scientific and engineering accomplishments, not to mention luxury, that was unimaginable a hundred years ago. I still don’t have a flying car, a fact that peeves me greatly, but I do have a computer in my pocket that can reach anyone in the world at any time. It is like we have folded space, bringing nearly every one of the planet’s eight billion inhabitants closer to each other than at any other time in history.

And yet, it seems we as are as far apart today as we have ever been.

Why?

Because we choose to be.

It is, and always should have been, unacceptable to exalt oneself over another based on appearance. In the world we live in today, however, it is entirely acceptable to be prejudiced against people who hold different social or political views. It is the one instance, in fact, where it has become permissible, even acceptable, to hate. Even more, for those most influenced by this view of the world, it would actually be immoral not to judge and shun those whose ideas we despise.

This is an existential crisis, striking at the very essence of humanity, and a classic instance of turning anyone who thinks differently from us into “the other.”

And yet, since this ideology arose out of a particular way of looking at the world, it can be diverted by a change in perspective too, one that sees the humanity in every human being.

To finish the quote with which I began: “Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth …, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness … may be made manifest.”