The Humanitarian

I beg the youngest of you, to arrange your life in such a way so that each
challenge before you, is the hardest thing you have ever done.

To paraphrase Thoreau: I beg you to live and grow up deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, to see what love of wisdom has to teach,
and not, when it comes to die, discover that you, my dear friend, had. not.
yet. lived.

Life is not random, it is not an accident, you are an emergent plateau in
an infinity of time ahead. You are needed, and your lasting contributions
are necessary.

Humanity must break away from the circles. Progress in the larger world,
begins with you, at home, right now. Just the moment you say, “I am not
smart enough”, “I am not a hero”, “I will never be heard”, “I will never be
enough”, “Too Scary!”. That is how every hero begun, by measuring up; and
then by growing up to the challenges before us.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights needs work, each generation
needs to update it and extend it beyond what it is today, grant it new
voices - and there are bright new voices to be heard.

And there are voices that never stopped, fell out of the modern spotlight,
but were never silenced, and never tired. No more circles.

I hope we will commit ourselves to building a human rights movement to end
mass incarceration. A movement for education, not incarceration. A movement
for jobs, not jails, and a movement to end all those forms of legal
discrimination against people released from prison. Discrimination denying
them basic human rights to work, to shelter, and to food.

73.5 million people in the United States have a criminal record. Michelle
Alexander wrote a book entitled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness which is also available as an
Audiobook

“Each of us is more, than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

“Our humanity depends on everyone’s humanity.”

“Opposite of poverty is justice.”

Bryan Stevenson has helped achieve United States Supreme Court decisions that prohibit sentencing children under 18 to death or to life imprisonment without parole.

Kandice Sumner's idea beyond share & donate, is prevention. She sees young children asking powerful questions. She is trying to help them inherit wisdom from books, stories, history, and push them away from poverty.

It is heartbreaking that videos like “Don’t Talk to the Police” must exist.
A Police Officer must also be a Hero, a force of Goodness. Any compromise
between good and evil only hurts the good and helps the evil.

December 10th, is The Human Rights Day and yet again, the hopelessness
turns to hope as we are granted a globally recognized focal point, and an
opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants.

When this nation is ready, December 10th will become the walkout day. For
District Judges, their staff, Attorneys, their assistants, for Bad Cops,
Good Police Officers, and their COs. On their mind will be the thought,
that to create a life long, legal, discrimination against an individual, is
a Human Rights violation. It should be impossible to ask the legal
community to follow the rule of law in the short term, and violate Human
Rights in the long run.

Poverty, plays a massive role in crime. We learn in this letter that
opposite of poverty is justice, in other words, poverty is an injustice.
Can we serve as an impartial juror, knowing that the defendant would likely
not commit the crime, had they not been fractured by poverty? Every child
has a bright future ahead, Art, Music, Ultramarathons, Astrophysics -
goodness - Combinatorial Genomics, and Astrobiology. But poverty is
extremely corrosive, too corrosive to handle, not only in it self, but in
the surrounding culture that it frequently creates. Poverty is a virus
armed with addiction, abuse, intolerance, xenophobia, violence, and dark
blind stupidity.

Some years from now we will accept the challenge that Michelle Alexander
put us to, and we will learn to look ahead far enough to begin to put many
more things right.

In great part because of you, my Dear Reader. Because you will raise your
children, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights high up on the
wall. Both as a sacred document, and as an aim for your child to grow up
high enough, to make lasting contributions to, a reminder that growing up,
is not optional.

My Dear Heroes, here in US, a state law that goes against federal law is
null and void. It is my hope that some day, a much more powerful Universal
Declaration of Human Rights may render both State and Federal laws null and
void. We are one family, one people.

I ask you to build homes with the belief that the inherent dignity and
equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family are the
foundation of freedom, justice and peace in all of the world, because
our humanity depends on everyone’s humanity.

We'll put things right, we'll fix it all.

Don’t be frightened of becoming a hero. It is always the longest possible
way there, and it is always on the shoulders of giants, my friends.

By rising to the challenge, you become part of the family of great heroes,
of great beings. You see, the adults are not going to run the world
forever, by the time you become an adult, they are going to retire.

The job will belong to you. Break out of the circles, and aim up, all the
way up.

All the bad ideas must be left behind, and all the good ideas put in one
place where we can each share in them, where every member of the human
family can Converge on Wisdom.

The human family is not divided by political borders. Kandice’s kids aren’t
the only kids that need help. This is not just a national crisis, it is a
global one.

A school under Metro bridge teaches these Delhi slum children