Today's
Quotation:
It
is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that
human
history is shaped.
Each time a person stands up for
an ideal or strikes out
against injustice, he or she sends forth
a tiny ripple of hope,
and crossing each other from a million
different centers of energy
and daring those ripples build
a current which can sweep down the
mightiest walls
of oppression and resistance.
Robert F. Kennedy
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Today's
Meditation:
Standing
up for what's right can be one of the most difficult things
that anyone can do. When we're faced with situations
in which doing the "right thing" can cause us a
significant amount of negativity on the part of other
people, it's much easier to take the easier way out and not
say anything, or even worse, agree with something that we
know is wrong.
Part
of the problem is that usually we see no immediate positive
results of our standing up for what's right, though we often
see very negative results. It's easy to hold back from
protesting a wrong or praising an unpopular right action
when we know that the immediate result for ourselves can be
ridicule, anger, or other very negative responses.
But
those tiny ripples of hope need to be sent out to join with
all of the other ones in the world, so that the positive
energy and love and hope that we all hope to feel and
experience can grow and thrive. And sometimes, we have
to throw out that hope no matter what results it may bring
to us. Keeping safe and avoiding unpleasantness may
help us in the short term, but the long-term effects of not
following our conscience have been consistently proven to be
very negative.
Injustice
is all around us. Standing up against it isn't always
a great idea--confronting a killer who's still holding a gun
may get us killed, and then how can we help others?--but if
we search for ways to stand up and give voice to that which
we know is right, we can enrich our lives and give ourselves
a deeper sense of satisfaction concerning our contribution
to this world.
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