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Like many of you, I suspect, I was raised by a mother generous in the love she gave, and wise in her ways.  My four siblings and I benefited greatly from her counsel, and agree to this day that she was right about almost everything.

Whenever I was angry with my brother or one of my sisters, for example, she would caution me, If you have nothing good to say, don’t say anything at all.

Many of our relatives in my mother’s large, extended family were gregarious, well-informed on most subjects, opinionated, and frequently argumentative, so holiday gatherings occasionally became loud and disputatious.  At such moments, my mother would advise me, Sometimes it’s better to say nothing, even if they might think you don’t understand, than to open your mouth and prove it.

Occasionally, I would arrive home from school with some juicy bit of gossip, and she would say, If your friends are talking about other people behind their backs, you can be sure they talk about you when you aren’t there.  And when I would nod as if I understood, she would add, It’s always best to stick up for people who aren’t there.

Decades later, I encountered that last advice again in a landmark book by Stephen Covey, who exhorted his readers: Defend those who are absent—one of my mantras to this day.

A good number of my mother’s admonitions were homespun, she having been raised by descendants of  Scots/Irish farming-stock who had emigrated to eastern Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century.  It’s a long road that has no turning, she would tell me when I’d recount a tale of woe, feeling sorry for myself.  If I’d had a quarrel with a schoolmate, she would say, The road to a friend’s house is never long.  Or if I was sad and blue when things weren’t going well, she’d tell me, When things are dark, try to be the light that someone else can turn on.

I think of my mother often these days, and I miss her wisdom.  I wonder what she’d have to say about this world we live in now, with all its strife and turmoil. 

No one in our family was ever subjugated by an invading people, exploited and dispossessed of our native land.  None of us has ever been despised and disenfranchised because of our nationality, our ethnicity, our skin-colour, our religious beliefs, our gender orientation, our political preferences, our wealth or lack of it, our age, or any perceived disability.  Throughout our lives, in fact, we have been among the privileged of the earth.

Such is not the case for the human species as a whole, however.  Worldwide, a huge number of people are victimized by war, famine, drought, disease, and genocide, some to the point of death.  And for many of those who survive, barely, there is scant relief offered by others of our species.

The product of a random, evolutionary progression over millennia, we human beings at our most primal level are forever a tribally-oriented species.  We seek to be with our own, and are suspicious of any who are different.  We are intelligent, yes, but also egocentric, selfish, aggressive, predatory, manipulative, superstitious, and too often unforgiving.  And because these character traits often override the intelligence factor, is it any wonder we currently find ourselves in such a mess?

Many of the several wars consuming the planet right now, for instance, are the result of clashes among opposing superstitious beliefs—what we sanctimoniously call religion—where each protagonist claims there is no god but our own.  And as if that doesn’t constitute folly enough, consider that many historic wars were waged by our predecessors who claimed allegiance to the same god, even as they prayed to that deity by different names. 

Such foolishness, when earthly power was truly the false god they all desired!

We humans have allowed ourselves—perhaps through a callous disregard for our collective well-being, or maybe due gross ignorance of the consequences we soon shall face—to approach a point of no return.  We seem not to realize that the civilization we profess to admire is but the thinnest of veneers, perched precariously atop the baser instincts of our species.

My mother used to say, The circle is not complete until everybody is inside.  We should always try to make the circle wider, so that everyone can come in.

Decades later, I chanced upon remarkably similar advice, this time in one of Michael Connelly’s crime-novels, spoken by one of his fictional characters, Harry Bosch:  Everybody counts, or nobody counts.

Would our current state of world-affairs be better, I wonder, if we humans could ever adopt that premise?  If we could set aside our preoccupation with the many issues differentiating and separating us, and instead take up the humanistic character-traits we share that might bring us together?

I mean, who counts?