of fostering mutual understanding and bringing people closer
together may seem ordinary and unexciting, but they in fact
constitute a bold and daring challenge to create
a new era of human civilization. -Daisaku Ikeda
It's tempting to say that things used to be better, but I can't be sure. I think they were, but there's so much that I don't know that it's impossible for me to know definitely. It seems to me, though, that people used to cooperate with each other more often and better. We used to value working together whether we agreed with each other politically or religiously or ethically or not--cooperation was much more important than any petty differences that we had with each other. When we work together, we're able to share ideas and support one another, and the finished result is pretty much always superior to any results that we might achieve on our own. But these days we see so many people who absolutely refuse to work with anyone who doesn't think as they do and believe as they do, and the result is that we're seeing very little being achieved compared to what we used to achieve. We spend much less time thinking about how to help one another and much more time trying to bring each other down, and that's simply a recipe for disaster. For me, myself, my hope is that I'll always do what I can to cooperate with others so that I can both help them to be better and allow them to help me to be better.
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