I wrote this twenty years ago, when I was a younger and perhaps more idealistic man. I came across it recently as I was perusing old files. About to delete it, I instead opened and read it. Given some things taking place now, I thought it worth posting here.
A Declaration of Interdependence
When in the course of world events, it becomes necessary for the Peoples of the World to admit and declare the bonds that connect us and to acknowledge the interdependence into which the Laws of Nature, God and Humanity have brought us, a decent respect for Humankind impels us to affirm our unity.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all Peoples are created equal; That we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; That to secure these rights, people have associated ourselves into families, clans, tribes, communities, states, nations, and religions; That when the boundaries drawn between these various affiliations become divisive of different Peoples and therefore destructive to the rights of people, it is the right and duty of the Peoples to denounce division and to transcend our borders by recognizing the fundamental indivisibility and essential oneness of all Humankind.
History demonstrates that lines long drawn are not lightly erased, and experience shows that Humankind is more disposed to suffer familiar constraints than to expand beyond the limitations to which we are accustomed. But when hunger and fear, intolerance, abuse and violence become the intractable result of artificial boundaries, it is the right, the duty, of the Peoples to rise above faction and to proclaim our unity.
Such now is the station of the Peoples, and such now is the necessity which moves us to broaden our vision. The history of Humankind is a drama of recurring wrongs all having as their common, and false, premise the notion of intrinsic differences between Peoples. Let us candidly admit to ourselves and to each other:
We have defeated and delayed laws helpful and necessary to the great majority where we perceive such laws to be inimical to our own special interests;
We have, upon taking power, dissolved and destroyed representative bodies to facilitate our invasions of the rights of others;
We have administered justice unequally, along lines of ethnicity, religion, color, creed, gender, nationality and class;
We have usurped the wealth and resources of our own nations to fuel and feed vast standing armies we have then used to harass and hold down others;
We have used our armies to invade, occupy, conquer and control the peoples of other lands, degrading their customs, their cultures and their religions for the glory and convenience of our own;
We have hindered the immigration and naturalization of new peoples into our territories;
We have cut off the free flow of trade among nations, and taxed trade unequally;
We have sacked each other’s cities, seized each other’s treasures and enslaved each other’s’ citizens;
We have conscripted our young to fight against each other for our own glory, stubbornness and pride;
We have killed. We have killed each other by the family and by the clan. We have killed each other by the tribe and by the community. We have killed each other state by state, and nation by nation. We have killed by the handful, by the score, by the thousand and by the million. We have killed to the limit of our ability to kill. And we have ever strived to increase our capacity to kill.
At every stage in history, the Peoples have pleaded for benevolence, cursed injustice, cried in outrage, and prayed in desperation.
We, therefore, the Peoples of the World, appealing to each other and to the Supreme Judge of the World, do, in the name and for the benefit of all people hereby declare: That we are, all of us, Equal in Rights, Equal in Virtue, Equal in Worth; That we are, all of us, a Single Race, identical in our humanity; That we are, all of us, inexorably intertwined and Interdependent; That we are bound by our kinship with each other to promote peace, commerce and the free flow of ideas within and among all the Peoples.
And in the spirit of this Declaration, with the firm conviction that all are one and one are all, that our boundaries are but lines in the sand, and that in the end, we must and shall all rise or fall together, we mutually pledge to each other our respect, our cooperation, our aid, our wealth and, when necessary, even our lives.