I don't know who you are, as you read this. I don't even know that you're reading this. But I hope you'll hear me out.

I am not religious, but I have a faith of sorts -- I believe that some day, people like you and like me, and those that live and walk alongside us, will stop listening to old fools like those who've started what looks to be our latest round of wars, and will find a way to come together. It probably won't happen all at once, but once it really starts, it won't be stopped.

We'll realize, as individual societies -- and, eventually, as the whole of humanity at once -- that we're better when we work with each other instead of tearing each other apart. Collaboration instead of competition. No, it won't be a utopia. Those don't exist. But it will be a lot better than what we have here now. We won't need special government programs to support most folks in poverty -- which is not to say poverty will be eliminated. Let's be realistic! But there will be less of it, and where it is, society itself will be the support program. We truly are each others' keepers, after all, and we'll finally be acting like it.

Not to mention that we won't be beholden any more to a few old men with questionable sanity and delusions of adequacy -- or the need, possibly, to compensate for what they otherwise don't have elsewhere...

"Every man for himself" is a phrase that is bad for the individual at many levels and a detriment, if not an outright danger, to a civilized society. Look around you at all the people who suffer because of what they can't get in their own isolation. Do you really think that it's genuinely their fault, across so many demographic categories, when so many struggle in so many ways? No. It is the systemic cost of isolation in a system that benefits from it.

Ours is a society that is designed to isolate for the specific purpose of its greater socioeconomic function: to exploit those who already have too little for the personal and familial gain of those who already have too much.

I have a better idea. It's not my idea, though. I'm just a messenger... a vessel. A mouthpiece. The idea itself is expressed in a phrase far older than any modern civilization still in existence today. This is an idea so old that it not only predates modern civilization, it predates the invention of writing. This is a concept that hails from the era when mankind was still in the Fertile Crescent and taking its first steps into what is now the African Savanna. It could be argued that this is an idea, a concept, a thought so old that its first occurrence was in the mind of an evolutionary precursor to Homo Sapiens.

The phrase, in modern English, that expresses this almost primordial thought is -- "It takes a village..."

Sure, it's just my opinion, but maybe, just maybe, it's time we stopped tearing lives apart and pulling things down, and started building villages together.