Diversity

It's really quite a shame when we feel so much fear of people who look different than us, who do things differently than we do, who speak in languages that are different from ours. It's a shame when we allow prejudices to dim our view of humanity, to make us dislike others simply because they have some differences from us. When we fear and dislike others, we lose. We lose opportunities to learn to see the world in different ways, to learn of varying perspectives, to understand how others feel and thus grow in compassion and love and acceptance. Our world is a very diverse place, and it does us no good at all to imagine that the only important views are the ones we grew up with, that the most acceptable people are the ones who share our skin color or our cultural norms and history. Our world needs people of all types to work together to try to forge solutions to our problems together, learning from each other as we go that there are different ways of seeing and doing things, and allowing people who are completely different from us in many ways to shape the ways that we see the world.

Let us be among the first to accept all of the people that God created as complete equals in all ways, and let us learn from each other. No fear, no prejudice, no anger, no hatred--just love, acceptance, and compassion.

Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity,
in the comparison and conciliation of differences.

Mikhail Gorbachev