Living on Spaceship Earth, Cyrus the Great, global tolerance while doing no harm

Imagine your home has a blocked toilet, and raw sewerage is overflowing onto the bathroom floor.

How many hours would you tolerate this before you took very decisive action? Hours…maybe minutes..even seconds.

Or imagine one of your kids is throwing rocks at another of your kids. Really throwing. Big rocks.

Or your partner speaks to you as if you were a nothing and a nobody of any significance?

Or you have a child who has no access to food, clean water, or health care?

Few of us would abide by these conditions in our own homes.

Yet we may find this completely acceptable in the world out there.

Trouble is, we no longer live in our little worlds. What actions are taken in my world will affect yours.

Our lifestyle and behaviours are already displacing people from their homes…innocents…all.

There is no longer a THERE we can throw away to.

This, this realisation and recognition, is the most marvellous aspect of living in a global world.

We live on Spaceship Earth. One Spaceship. One Earth. Not one nation, one country, one place. The raw sewerage problem over there is our problem. The rubbish you drop now on the ground is not removed from you. If it doesn’t affect you, it will affect someone, somewhere…or your kids…sometime soon.

Cyrus the Great had one law. The law of intolerance. Within his reign, no one was allowed to be intolerant of or toward another. Everyone was allowed to live as they chose, with one proviso, that their actions did not harm or hinder the actions of another.

This type of leadership existed 2,500 years ago.

Perhaps now is the time to restore a similar leadership principle.

Photo credit:  dynamosquito via Compfight