What The World Needs Is Love

The past few years have been rife with tragedies of magnum proportions. Inflicted not as much by nature as by the ‘supreme beings’ that exist on the planet called, Earth – human beings. The sadness is a cloak that gets thicker with each incident of hate. Covered in blood and flesh of those who are innocent. Who decides which life is not worth it therefore gets rid of it?

We take it upon our hands to destroy but at what cost? We are beings who were given reasoning yet we incarcerate and kill not to create anything that breeds good but only hate.

Today, at this point and right now, I’d like you to think of a man who walked this planet 20 years ago – Carl Sagan, the American cosmologist, scientist and astrophysicist. He has explained space in a way that is spectacular and bewildering as well.

I’d like to share his “Pale Blue Dot” commentary on his cosmic perspective of Earth after a photograph of the planet was taken at a distance of 4 billion miles. His commentary serves as a reminder to each one of us that we, as humans live in a universe that really, isn’t about us.

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Every word rings true, doesn’t it? All we are is a granular element and our presence in the universe may even be ephemeral — a flash of luminescence in a great dark ocean.

Is hate and killing resolving anything?!

Poverty, sickness, aloneness? What world are we leaving for our children?

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

No, not just for some but for everyone.

Prayers of peace and love,