Ruthla Aier, CTC
The realities of life makes life look so bitter and remorseful, yet we go on living. We see people choosing richness over ability, status over talents, favoritism over equality, beauty over good character, yet we go on living. There is sadness, bitterness yet we go on living. Sermons, lecturers, seminars, talks, walks, etc. are organized yet the culture of favoritism, partiality continues which is the root cause of all the evils in the society. Everyone has its favorite but when it is used in place of true talents, equality, justice, peace, and truth, it becomes ugly; yet we go on living because we are blinded by cultural impunity. We cannot change people’s mentality, ego, conservative, or liberalist attitude. We cannot change their opinion. We cannot just judge them because their views do not blend with ours.
The bitter truth of life is that we cannot change the practice but what we can is to re-cultivate a new culture. We talk of change in society, church, and family about clean election, right procedure for job interviews, demand rightful salaries, corruption, liquor prohibition, justice, peace and equality. Everyday newspapers, blogs, facebook page is filled with write up about need for peace, incidents where justice was denied, yet we hardly see any change. The efforts seems meaningless yet life goes on because the culture of hope is already in people as a society, church and family but not as individuals and so we need that culture of hope to be felt within us. Thus, hope from the individuals should be cultivated as a new culture of hope. Change has to start from us, if we need a clean place; we need to start by picking up the dirt instead of only speaking about it. If we want justice, we need to start by practicing in our daily activities of life. If we want peace, we need to start by forgiving each other known and unknown to us who are blinded by wealth, pride, ego, money because of which they have failed to see the real picture behind their dark lens. From the many blessing given to us by God, He has given us the freedom of will, but this has been misunderstood and misused many a times. The freedom given by God is with a responsibility to take care of the earth and not destroy it.
Thus, it should be grasped and used in re-cultivating the new culture of hope within us as individuals so that it will be infectious enough to affect others as a communitarian society. We should be able to grasp the only freedom we have in this tradition bound society, “freedom to think, believe” and use it effectively to grow hope within us and act upon it through our speech and action as well. There will be continuity of favoritism, dishonesty, injustice but with the practice of hope and doing what is right, at least we will not waste out energy of being angry and sad, waste our time and money over what is happening around us. But hope within us will help us to live and in the course of time I believe it will transform the world.
