Harmony and Coexistence in a Process of Change

It is essential for harmony and coexistence to prevail as a society evolves; it is also true that to ensure their continuity we need to reconcile a great diversity of interests, values, and material and psychological needs. It is difficult to live in harmony and good coexistence in a world of sharp contrasts and aggressions. How to tackle this tension? How to preserve harmony and social coexistence without validating injustice, crime, crass inequality? How to practice harmony and coexistence without falling into the complicity of tolerating or supporting affronts that end up jeopardizing them? Facing this issue is not a simple task, but not doing so is dangerous and destructive.It is essential for harmony and coexistence to prevail as society evolves; it is also true that to ensure their validity we need to reconcile a diversity of interests, values, and material and psychological needs. It is difficult to live in harmony and good coexistence in a world of sharp contrasts, as when poverty and indigence exist side by side with opulence and superfluous consumption; it is unfair, painful, irritating. It is also difficult to attain harmony and good coexistence when one undergoes the aggression of corruption, insecurity, the destruction of the environment, the traffic of people, drug dealing, mafias sometimes related to politics or to the very security forces. And nevertheless, although it may sound paradoxical, we need harmony and good coexistence to mobilize wills, group efforts, capable of facing those same evils.

How to tackle this tension? How to preserve harmony and social coexistence without validating injustice, crime, crass inequality? How to practice harmony and coexistence without falling into the complicity of tolerating or supporting affronts that end up jeopardizing them? Facing this issue is not a simple task, but not doing so is dangerous and destructive.

Living in harmony and good coexistence implies having developed a certain degree of personal and social maturity. It entails having received education, practiced a life experience that take harmony and coexistence as a prized value -promoted and extolled as such by the social ensemble and vigorously defended when it is being threatened. In this matter value makers play a fundamental role, be them parents of children and adolescents, teachers, intellectuals, political, religious, trade union and social movements leaders, civil society organizations, the corporate world and the media.

This preeminence of harmony and good coexistence is also based on the validity of fair social and economic conditions. Without them, the yearning for living in harmony and coexistence can be used to preserve painful situations of injustice and deep lack of affection. As a matter of fact harmony and coexistence do not imply tolerating injustice or ignoring social changes that are necessary to promote and give way to; by contrast, to maintain harmony and good social coexistence we must face –with courage and frankness- that which produces disunity, sharpens antagonisms, encourages physical and moral violence, as are, among other causes, situations of inequality, poverty and indigence.

Wealth overly concentrated in the hands of a few is an affront for the many who only contemplate it from the opposite sidewalk. Instead, it should be mobilized to generate opportunities for those who know and are willing to undertake economic, social or cultural initiatives; endeavors developing knowledge and generating new wealth at the base of the social pyramid, encouraging those who are left behind and looking after the unprotected. Privileges derived from political and social power also constitute grievances. Harmony and good coexistence need to repair, contain, build bridges, ensure inclusiveness, heal up wounds, take care of others’ needs. When building a country for all we boost a huge social energy that is now being clumsily wasted; we relate in better terms with other people, our communities and also the environment that supports us.

A family that is immersed in indigence, attacked by the milieu, forgotten by a society it is a part of and cannot influence, stuck in despair, surrounded by the selfishness and meanness of those who could help to repair its situation and do not do so, must make a great effort of generosity to practice harmony and good coexistence with the rest.

Affluent individuals who would take no interest in the others’ well being, who would only act in their own interest, who accumulate in a frenzied way material satisfactors that exceed those needed to lead a dignified life, who consciously cause suffering using schemes that the law is not able to confront, do not have the right to invoke that supreme value of harmony and good social coexistence when they sabotage it with their behavior.

How to expect that those who are being assaulted defend harmony and good coexistence without seeing light at the end of the tunnel! They will rightly wonder: harmony and good coexistence, what for?, so as to preserve the opprobrium my family is submerged in?, in order to reproduce poverty, the indignity of my situation?

And how not to distrust selfish people that claim harmony and good coexistence only to ensure the conditions that enable them to perpetuate their conduct! They support that type of harmony and coexistence, but not the other one, the one that entails fairness, justice, solidarity, fraternity, that promotes changes with prudence to make peace and well being viable for all. They look at that one with mistrust because they fear it will end up doing away with the privileges they enjoy; although this fear is unfounded as a transformation for all can also be carried out avoiding severe traumatisms; although history shows time and again that what does not change gradually with time only finishes incubating storms and discontent that make even riskier the trajectory of privilege.

Let us put it clearly: most of our people are about to live in harmony and good coexistence, but we need to work and be alert to ensure that attitude is sustained. We cannot afford to let meanness, selfishness or negligence to sterilize such a social capital. It would be a very serious mistake to take for granted what has taken years to build. In a moment of blindness, we can lose or seriously compromise harmony and good social coexistence; they are then hard to recover.

The challenge that remains over time, constantly renewed in ways and manners that change with circumstances, is to reconcile, to align with ability, with intelligence, with generous spirit, a huge diversity of interests, values and material and psychological needs that all of us have –those who make up our neighborhoods, our country, our region, our world. In that effort to set up, to channel, to catalyze energies, harmony and good social coexistence are, at the same time, the result of that process and a necessary condition for its full development. Seeing this with clarity helps to build a better present; ignoring it condemns us to invest too much energy in internal struggles and fights it is very difficult to get out from.

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