Communication is always a great topic, isn’t it? Because you would think, that’s the reason that we go to school, to learn to speak to one another.

And there is some truth in the fact that I can touch you, I can feel the warmth of your body, and who are you? I don’t know, but through communication, I can get pretty close, can’t I?

I can realize that you are a similar human being to me, you have the same needs, the same wants, the same desires.

And I’ve traveled enough in my life to know that human beings, at least the ones that I’ve met, and I’ve met many in my almost 70 years of life, are similar to me. We want the same things, but the one thing that we all want for sure is peace.

We want to be in a situation to be able to watch our children and grandchildren grow up. We want to be able to walk down a street without concern of getting attacked or mugged, as is described in the things along this nature.

So then comes the question, if you’re a bit of an historian, comes the question about this phenomenon of war. Why in the 21st century do we continue to have war around the world?

Now, to be fair, I think war in the past, especially in regards to communication, could be relatively easily understood, because peoples just didn’t travel and they didn’t know one another.

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a French ship during the Napoleonic Wars that sunk off the coast of northern England. And everyone drowned except the ship’s monkey.

And they captured the monkey, and they brought the creature into the town, and they sentenced the monkey ultimately to death, and the monkey was hung. Now, why would you think a monkey was similar to you and me? Well, two things.

One, the French had been totally vilified, even though there’s only a distance of 18 kilometers across the strait to France, between Dover and France, totally vilified.

And, of course, the monkey is just speaking gibberish, so that’s obviously French. Now, could this story be true? I’ve heard it more than once.

There’s probably some truth to this. But this is no longer the case. We know now that the Japanese and the Germans and the Russians and the Israelis and the Muslims and all the rest of it are exactly like us.

We want peace and we want to see our families placed in a situation of safety. So what’s going on? Somehow there is a failure in communication, obviously, at some level.

So how should we communicate becomes the question. Well, the biggest one is to always be honest.

And obviously, in international affairs, some people are not honest and they’re promoting, perhaps, a nationalistic or a warlike stance, and some people easily, because perhaps they lack intelligence, you would assume, subscribe to it and they

believe the nonsense, that we are a better people than you are, etc. Right?

So in this case, we better man up here, as they say, and avoid blaming one group of people over the other. Humanity has done horrible things to each other without any question at all, but I think the blame game is over now.

And it seems to me that a lot of this blaming, be it may slavery or colonialism, etc., are really predicated on things that most human beings today had nothing to do with. They are not responsible at all. So it’s a little bit like having regrets.

You bring a memory of the past forward and you bring it to today and you energize it for perhaps political game, because people seem to subscribe easily to something that occurred a hundred or two hundred years ago.

I often tell my students that my great-grandfather was a slave, and they’re quite startle when they look at me, because they see that I’m white. How could your great-grandfather be a slave? I said, well, of course, he was a serf.

Very similar to slavery, and in the great history of slavery, everyone, all races have been slaves. An historical fact, so it’s unnecessary to blame a certain group for perpetuating slavery, because many, many people perpetuated slavery.

And then we all have to be responsible. There is no group in human civilization that has been ultimately pure and not been tainted by some level of evil.

And I think if we’re really going to communicate honestly, we have to be able to actually share our past openly without any question at all.

And then of course, the biggest one when it comes to communication, right from the great philosophers, of course, perhaps you are being misunderstood. People don’t really understand what you’re saying. Not really.

They acknowledge that you’re uttering some words, but because perhaps of your experience or their experience, they don’t really understand what you’re trying to communicate at all. And so, this produces the problem of self-image in a way.

Some people, some races have a very low self-image, for sure. Well, for whatever reason.

And I think this is a factor you have to bring into real communication because people are perhaps upset with themselves and they’re going to project that negativity, that poverty mentality onto you, onto your people as well.

So, I think it is so necessary that we learn to listen, right? We have to listen. If we don’t listen, we ultimately will never get to the truth, will we?

Because in the bigger picture of life, where humanity is at a point that we’re perilously close to ending civilization as we know it, and all great civilizations over time, be it May, the early Mesopotamians, in Iraq, all the way up to the British

Empire, now the American Empire, all of these empires eventually existed in time, and they eventually ascended and then descended and disappeared. Now, because we are dealing with world civilization, if our civilization itself, our global

civilization changes, things are going to be very difficult for humanity to continue in its present incarnation. So, I think the only way we’re going to change the world, so to speak, is to change the self.

I must promise myself on a daily basis that I’m going to start to learn to communicate with my wife, my partner, my children. Really communicate, if possible. Then perhaps to my friends, to my society at large, and then to the larger world.

I’m going to try to communicate.

And if this is possible, if we follow some of those ideas that I mentioned before, we are going to be well on the way to ending human conflict. Because once again, we all want peace. If I say, I love you, everyone understands me.

I love you like a father, a partner, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a teacher. Whatever it is, I understand. But if I say, I hate you, total lack of communication.

No one understands what I mean. You don’t like the way I look, the way I smell, you don’t like my politics. What’s going on here?

Totally confused. So I think it’s there when it comes to hate, that we really have to try to learn to be calm and patient, and realize that the basic need of that other person, the basic needs are similar to your own.

And you know what they say, you know what they say. Critical thinking is extremely important, especially if we’re going to finally have peace and real communication. And critical thinking is great, truly great.

You take care. Please have a wonderful day. Find your joy.

God bless. Bye-bye