Destination: A Kinder World

There's a place I've been wanting to visit for quite awhile. There won't be any strangers there because everyone you meet will become a friend. No car horns will be honking because patience will be plentiful. Derogatory names won't be used as words will be filtered through a veil of compassion, and people would rather sit and talk awhile than to waste precious energy and time arguing about something that won't matter in twenty years.

Some might call it utopia, but this isn't a perfect world I'm thinking about. It's a kinder one. Sure, gas prices can still be a little bit on the high side, and we might work longer hours than we want. Occasionally, a storm might arise that causes us to take shelter, and some days may be a little too warm for our liking, but those are inconveniences that we can handle with friends by our side.

In this gentle world, enemies will no longer exist. You see, many times who we think is our enemy is really just someone we don't understand, someone who lives a different life than we do. In my dream destination, everyone will have already accepted that no two of us are like. And that's perfectly fine with...well...everyone.

And the internet! That bountiful fount of knowledge would be a place to gain information not negativity. Cyber-bullying? No one will have heard of it. It would have been eradicated years ago when we all realized that living life was so much more important than trying to destroy it.

I have thought so much about this world and what it will be like when I first realize I've arrived. Maybe it won't be a place I'll have to travel to after all. Perhaps it will come to me, to all of us. This dream destination will start with one smile then two. It will continue when one person realizes that the hate they feel inside is poisonous. So they'll tell another person who'll tell another person.

No one will be ridiculed, no one will be hated, and though life won't be perfectly perfect, it will be easier to breathe every morning. Now, I'm sure this is world doesn't exist yet. Because at this moment, there is someone being taunted online. Someone's place of business is being targeted because of their religion. Somewhere, there are people planning to hurt others because we don't all look alike, think alike, or live alike. These things have happened in the past, and I'm sure, for now, they'll continue to happen for some time.

But here's the thing about dreams. They aren't always impossible to achieve. Many of them aren't pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. This place I want to go doesn't exist right now, but I know it can. Why? Because we all have the ability to be kind. It's just a matter of perfecting that skill and silencing our instinct to strike out at one another when we're angry or dissatisfied.

One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, we will realize that the person we see on television whose politics we don't agree with is a person who has thoughts, dreams, goals, and an occasional bad day just like the rest of us. We'll see that family who doesn't look like our own is simply a family that wants to live their lives. And the people who've chosen to live their lives differently than we do are doing so because they have that right. And we'll believe that everyone deserves to live in a kinder, peaceful world, but in an effort to reach that destination, we have to take the first steps.

This world I imagine isn't just a place I want to visit; it's where I want to live.