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Progress takes hard work. It takes passion, it takes dedication. The inspiring kind is almost never straightforward, but then life never is. As humans we always have a knack of turning the "bad" into the "good", but we also have a great propensity to destroy what is beautiful.We can act as high ladders to achievement, or be the craggy rocks in its way. We can push progress, just as much as we can hinder it. The only problem is that it appears we find it easier to destroy than to create, even if it isn't as fulfilling. A whole lot of factors push us towards the negative option, reminding us that our humanity is still very much a work in progress.
To many of us, our lives can feel like living with a fatal condition, unaware of the risk it poses - until the icy grip of disillusionment cracks and you get your "wake up call". It felt a little like that today, upon reading news reports about the planted explosions that claimed lives at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in the United States. Horrified at the loss of innocent life, my heart went out to the victims of this bombing as well as their families, and I momentarily fell mute. What can one say that adequately expresses such loss?
Being speechless in the face of such news is only natural; a profound dignity and deep respect can be expressed through silence, and while the London Marathon will need to be more aware of security following the bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday, my twin flame and I have decided that in a show of support we will attend the London event to participate in a 30-second silence at the start of the marathon on Sunday.
However, after the dust settles, we also need to talk - as a community and as a whole, to ask the right questions when things go wrong. And though we may wish to raise our voices against violence, no matter who is at fault here we cannot generalise; we need to talk about where the root of this lies.
Towards this aim then, I ask: Is this to do with the current political turmoil we find ourselves facing in the second decade of the 21st Century? Politicians are yet to learn how to "reign" rather than rule, thereby providing background stability rather than aggressive leadership, and so be role models for open societies on how to deal with bringing issues out from the personal into the public domain. Peaceful protest is the way to make your opinion heard, not by taking the lives of innocents. Politicians have yet to learn, too, that while traditional values may work in the home, it rarely works in politics, because a representative government will - like it or not - have to represent all sections of society.
Only half a decade ago in the US, homosexuality was punishable by up to 10 years in prison in some states. And the issue of same-sex relationships is still controversial thanks to puritanical politics - so much so that it remains the marker of American limits, even in the tolerance shown by its entertainment industry. Is this progress?
And women feel the lack to progress more than their male counterparts. It's an unfortunate truth that women are sexually harassed, and sometimes assaulted, the world over. But in India they have a special nick-name for it; "Eve-teasing" is treated as a kind of male sport by the Hindus. Is this progress?
Meanwhile in England, teenagers are murdering homeless people for a dare. It's certainly a sad reflection on our society's children that they can be party to serious violence purely for the sake of it - because it surely isn't progress.
Highlighting the lack of progress of teenagers in British prisons, "Prison Dads" is a BBC documentary following young fathers in Britain's biggest young offenders institution, and their partners on the outside, struggling to keep together their fledgling families. Contrasting the serious crimes of grievous assault and robbery and causing loss of life, the BBC documentary shows the perpetrators trying to come to terms with teenage fatherhood.
Revealing a thought-provoking statistic that these young men are 5 times more likely to be dads than others their age, watching the poignant documentary made me feel as though human progress is still going to be an issue for generations to come. Although we need to hold ourselves (even if only partly) accountable for the extremely challenging circumstances we face, listening to the childhood stories of the young offenders was like hearing a repeat performance of their parents - and there is a danger that we can demonise those sections of our society we don't easily understand.
Rest assured politicians will try to use this tragic event to blame whatever convenient enemies are most advantageous for their government. If the bomb blast is the work of Muslim sympathisers, then the word "terrorism" will come out of the closet; if the bomb blast is the work of an American citizen with a misguided conservative or "patriotic" attitude, then it will just be seen as the work of some mad individual we cannot understand, nor condone, but will be unwilling to demonise.
Worrisome as it is, this should be treated as a horrible, reprehensible fact of life, rather than something that undermines a nation's sense of self. It doesn't matter who is at the bottom of the blasts, in comparison to the loss of life and the damage done to the people there. In one sense, somewhere down the line, we are all responsible for the attack, and I felt disappointed that our humanity had let us down once again. Likewise, when I watched BBC Panorama's documentary on North Korea, the most rigidly controlled nation on Earth, I felt disappointed and embarrassed at reporter John Sweeney's apparent fixation with the country's poverty - as though this was some obvious sign of it being "wrong" and dutifully punished.
Naturally, North Korea's inhumane treatment of its people, its dangerous, aggressive polices against neighbouring countries and the US, and its racist, Nazi-like control over the minds of its citizens is worrying and it's no wonder the Western media tends to fall back on clichés. But Sweeney just kept pointing out the power cuts, the lack of commercial adverts, the lack of shops and the freedom to spend, hammering the point home by juxtaposing it with the gaudy, energy-sucking, and almost eighties-like irreverent opulence of South Korea.
Notwithstanding that the documentary has been criticised for using students as a human shield - by using 10 London School of Economics students as a cover to secretly film for eight days in the country - I found it jarring for its apparent relish at holding up North Korea's refusal of capitalism, rather than its appalling human rights record. With Europe and the US facing austere times due to the economic crisis we are still struggling with (and power cuts not such an impossibility in Plymouth as it is in Pyongyang), it is clear that neither communism nor capitalism has made much progress.
Neither have we as humans, it seems, if we still put issues such as money and revenge above the value of human life. So, again I ask myself: Are we progressing to the enlightenment we so often talk about, or are we regressing back to our caveman roots? Or have they always been there under our human pie, lurking underneath a thin crust of civilisation?
Because whatever we invent, we can always corrupt. Inventions can help us make use of our energy, or help us abuse it. For instance in America, a seemingly rational, intelligent 25-year-old man has freely made available the technology to "print" a gun using new 3D printing in the comfort of your own home. So, be you patriot, terrorist or slightly unbalanced, you can now now create a semi-automatic firearm at will, to use at your pleasure. The same human drive for innovation that tries to regenerate human organs to prolong life, paradoxically also has the charismatic savvy to ease the method in which we end it.
There are so many natural dangers that threaten life, why we want to add to these, I have no idea, and yet we end up being our own worse enemy. But although this may all sound like a huge chasm of progress, terrible things do bring people together to advance stronger. If an over-abundance of assault weapons were the precursor for the apocalypse of our species, we'd already be there. To put it in perspective we've had the technological capability to destroy entire cities with nuclear weapons since the 1940s, and yet here we are still, progressing as best we can. That says a lot for the toughness of the human spirit to survive.
Each of us is unique, but I think it's fair to say that every one of us has felt frustrated at one time or another by what appears to be a lack of abundance in our lives - and yet we don't all go grabbing for a gun, or try to build a bomb. Tragedy is the exception rather than the rule of daily living, but it has the greater impact on our memory. What we focus on is what fills our lives. It can also limit the way we perceive the world and ourselves. If you have a limiting belief about life, it will cause you to constantly repel the good things when they do come our way, despite our very best efforts to achieve it.
When tragedy strikes us, we shouldn't get carried away on the currents of automatic thinking; the human mind likes to associate things, and stereotype and label things, but this can often be a very discriminatory way of behaving. This doesn't mean we should ignore difficulties or problems for the sake of causing offence, but we should always focus on the solution, not the negativity. If we use positive words on ourselves and others, it's more likely that is what we'll receive back. We need to stop putting others down, and ourselves down, too.
We need to start reinforcing the positive messages in our lives, to nourish the positive and beautiful in ourselves. We are all more beautiful than we think. We should be more grateful to that natural self; it impacts the choices and friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children - it impacts everything. It couldn't be more critical to your happiness. As we pay attention to the goodness in the outside world, we strengthen it in ourselves. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because every time we pay attention to something, we energise its presence within us.
Consequently, the only way to defeat terror, is to refuse to be terrorised by it; to turn our back on it and refuse to allow our minds to be hijacked by it, or let our actions be corrupted by it. We should be saddened, horrified and angered by the act, but not allow ourselves to direct that anger as a channel (for ramped-up patriotism) to cause more anger. Rather than revenge, when tragedy occurs, we should look for reasons, and we should questions ourselves, too.
If we're willing to be really brave, and shine a little light on some uncomfortable inner dialogue about how we can really progress, then we'll already be halfway there. We need to ask the right questions, and of the right people - and trying to understand people that appear to despise your way of life will eventually come to the question of why we had to ask that in the first place. That dialogue will need tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness, all the traits we associate with love.
Some say love is a state of mind, and ultimately, the more we respond with a "like for like" attitude will depend on how quickly we progress in our human evolution to some sort of enlightenment towards the sacredness of life. We know life is precious; we invariably want to spend this precious commodity being happy. This means we need to start seeing each other as human beings, and let our strengths, not weaknesses, determine our human history.
We must give ourselves the credit of our good intentions, and the wisdom of our mistakes. There is no fixed meaning in life, except the meaning we bring to it. It is about a choice. In the BBC documentary about the tragic tales of young offenders, one of them revealed a moving tattoo he had drawn on his back, leaving an indelible warning for us all in regard to that choice. It wrote that death leaves a heartache no one can heal, but love leaves memories that no one can steal.
Or even more poignant is the image of eight-year-old Boston Marathon bombing victim Martin Richard, which has emerged online, holding up a handmade poster inscribed with the words: "No more hurting people, peace". In his memory, let's start leaving more memories with love, because when we do we'll realise that true progress, to a world where children no longer needlessly die, can only be made through love.
Yours in love,
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