May Syeda

Hunter College
January 1st, 2013
The Mortimer Levitt Essay Contest Submission The World of Tomorrow
To Step into the World of Tomorrow with Intention
In considering the World of Tomorrow, I am called to Muriel Rukeyser's lines, "I lived in
the first century of world wars. / Most mornings I would be more or less insane." In the last
hundred years the world has witnessed two World Wars, The Holocaust, Communist repression,
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, politically sanctioned mass murder, apartheid,
and civil wars. The twentieth-century is marred by cataclysmic atrocities on a global-scale
never before seen in the history of the world. To call any of these crimes against humanity a
senseless act of violence would be a naive simplification of human history. These atrocities
are not senseless but our ability to make sense of them, to chart the progression of violence over
time, is beyond our capacity and they become senseless in our minds. Was there anything we, as
a species, could have done to prevent these horrors or were they an inevitability of the time; an
extension and escalation of the first tribal wars between prehistoric men who have hunted and
gathered enough to survive the winter and those who have not? Will we ever come together,
globally, hand-in-hand, and say Enough is enough? Or is my suffering greater than yours, our
differences too extreme? Will the World of Tomorrow finally end with one mushroom cloud
engulfing that world as witnessed by a naked eye poised from the furthest corner of heaven?
Whether as large scale as the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the
subsequent War on Terrorism or as localized as the recent mass-shooting at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newton, CT we must make sense of these senseless atrocities if we hope to
step into the World of Tomorrow as a people working towards peace and not as somnambulists
stepping from one nightmare into the next. But what can we do as individuals in our daily
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practices to make peace in our lives and with the times in which we live?
The peace research ecovillage of Tamera in Portugal posits that there cannot be peace
between nations as long as there is war between man and woman. Could an answer exist within
the most cellular level of human interactionin how we treat those closest to us? If we stopped
using fear and control in our personal relationships to protect ourselves against jealousy and
abandonment--stopped thinking of love as a commodity-- could we foster love in the world at
large? If we raised our children in loving environments could we stop them from spreading hate
into the world? If we were to have compassion for our spouses and for our children rather than
attempting to change them to meet our needs and expectations could we encourage mindfulness
in all of our relationships outside of the home? Can we redefine our relationship to the world
and co-create communities that extend outside of the nuclear family in the spirit of cooperation
for the impending depletion of our worlds natural resources?
In The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Bhanu Kapil writes,WHO IS
RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SUFFERING OF YOUR MOTHER? Rather than cast blame for
the first stone we must shoulder the suffering of our mothers and encourage our children to love
without fear.