It is a wonderful attribute of ours that we can congratulate and commend something made by someone else in which we find no personal gain whatsoever either in standing or finances. All too often we find it easy to degrade the creations of others, or even to see them destroyed without a second’s thought because we never put the time into helping to make them or because they do not speak directly to us about our own immediate ancestry.
Because of this armies and individuals have gone around the world and fanned the flames of desecration of cities, temples, towns and lands without much regret. And yet what we destroy destroys a part of who we are. What we make as individuals adds to the sum of all we are as a species. A characteristic of humanity artists have understood since the beginning of mind, yet other people seem to find this difficult to grasp.
When we went around making empires thinking by killing what other people had we made ourselves more powerful what we were actually displaying was the poverty of our own fellowship with each other, the paucity of being able to see the worth in the foreign, the myopic chimera of nation and monarch. What in one century was the epitome of power, in all others looks like the height of ignorance.