By Wes Annac

I’m not bothered by who you are, where you come from, what you believe or even if you agree with the things I say.

I don’t care if you’re a Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, or if you’re waiting for the flying saucers. I don’t care if you consider yourself liberal or conservative, and as long as you don’t hurt others, I don’t care how you live.

I have no interest in judging you for being different from me, and hopefully, you have no interest in judging me. I’d rather find common ground, and it won’t bother me if your opinion is different from mine. Hopefully, it wouldn’t bother you either.

I just want to work together to improve the world. I just want to see people lay down their grudges, however deeply rooted, and accept that the differences between them and the people they hate are meaningless.

We’re all thinking, breathing, opinionated humans who share the same planet and the same life experience, and if we can’t respect each other for this, we can’t expect to do anything but run this planet into the ground.

If we can’t see that we’re all in this together, we have no hope for saving ourselves or our polluted planet. We’ll only make things worse if we continue to fight and bicker, but everything will change the moment we start to work with each other.

Because of this, I won’t judge how you live. I won’t give in to the temptation to gossip about you when you aren’t around, and I won’t treat you differently than I’d treat someone who shares my beliefs or my lifestyle.

I won’t alienate you from my community for being different, because conformity will drive us all into the grave; physically and spiritually. Uniqueness is no reason to reject someone, and hopefully, you would accept me for my uniqueness like I’d accept you for yours.

I want for us all to have the confidence to be ourselves, because only then can we work together to make a real change.

Some call me naïve. They say my worldview will never be embraced by the masses; I should accept that it’s a dog-eat-dog world and there’s nothing we can do about it.

They say we should keep our heads down and avoid connecting with others on a personal level because we all have nastiness inside of us, and while I respect that they feel this way and I understand why, I can’t agree.

The desire for unity doesn’t come from naivety or a lack of understanding of the real problems in the world; it’s a natural result of human evolution and the development of compassion. In time, I envision everyone coming together with respect for our differences, but right now it seems like a fool’s dream.

I’m happy to take a stand and say that it isn’t a dream. It’s a reality, and we’re making it happen step by step. We create unity daily by advocating and living it, and the worst thing we can do is let society convince us we’re foolish for trying.

True foolishness is isolating ourselves from each other and allowing an elite class to rule over us as a result, and unity is the remedy for Big Brother’s overbearing reach.

So feel free to live how you want and think what you want about life, and remember that love and kindness cure hatred. Don’t let anyone stop you from living authentically, and let any criticism rooted in a lack of love or understanding roll right off of you.

The world will eventually learn to love, and in the meantime, it’s up to us to illuminate the way.