Replace your fretting with a voice.

Speak up

About your truth.

Resist the wish to curl up under pillows

To avoid

Unpleasantness

Conflict

Misunderstanding.

Push against the wish to look the other way

When humans

Someplace ‘other’ than your home

Flee injustice.

Replace apathy or indifference

With empathy.

Replace a narrow vision

With expansion of your heart:

There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ unless you choose to emulate

Those who seek to divide and control

Instead of heal.

Replace your fear of the unknown

Your terror of the ‘stranger’

Whose lives, religion, culture

You don’t understand …

With the wisdom that we are

And never stopped to be

First and foremost human

And our children are as

Precious

As those born in other lands.

Replace the need to marginalize,

With the understanding that the only margins are those

We choose to accept

Or follow.

Replace the lumping of the ‘other’

Into warring words and baleful messages,

With actually seeing the individuals:

They are no different than you,

No less in need of help in times of crisis

They are no more inherently capable of hate

Than you.

Reject rhetoric that equates your safety

With the deprivation

Of another.

Replace it

With the facts:

We are stronger together

Than we ever can be

In division.

We are better together

Than we ever can be

In isolation.

We are safer in compassion

Than we ever can be

In prejudice or xenophobia.

We are all that we will nourish.

Speak up.

Let us help those who do not yet know truth,

See it

Hear it

Understand.