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The largest world women’s rights meeting ever held -- the 63rd U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, New York City -- bore the theme 'Creating the World Anew: Leaving No One Behind'.
It focused on empowering women and girls through social protection programs and promoting access to public services. Declaring the vital consequences of this goal, a statement by the Baha'i International Community (BIC) addressed the UN stating:
"A theme as weighty as providing social protection to all, particularly the most vulnerable—a majority of whom are women and children—must be considered in the light of a greater truth: that all of humanity is one, and all must benefit from the shared resources of our shared homeland." -- BIC Mar 8, 2019.
If we view the human race as one human body, we can recognise that it has travelled through the evolutionary stages of prehistory to early infancy, and thence to adolescence.
"The human race, as a distinct, organic unit, has passed analogous to the stages of infancy and childhood in the lives of its individual members, and is now in the culminating period of its turbulent adolescence approaching its long-awaited coming of age." --Universal House of Justice (UHJ), The Promise of World Peace (POWP).
As a mother and counsellor I recognise this time as an extremely crucial one in which young people must face crucial life choices. What are their personal values? What future opportunities can they imagine? What difference will their lives make? And poised to enter a new year, where do we all stand now?
"A sign of increasing maturity is the increase in co-operation among hitherto isolated and antagonistic peoples and groups in international undertakings and educational advances. However, our immaturity is still evident in that doubts, misconceptions, prejudices, suspicions and narrow self-interest still beset nations and peoples in their relations one to another. Clearly the prevailing order seems lamentably defective. However, new possibilities lie before us; a new period described in the following terms; "For the first time in history it is possible for everyone to view the entire planet, with all its myriad diversified peoples, in one perspective. World peace is not only possible but inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of this planet—in the words of one great thinker, “the planetization of mankind”. --UHJ. POWP.
And now a weighty choice lies before us all; "Whether peace is to be reached only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity’s stubborn clinging to old patterns of behaviour, or is to be embraced now by an act of consultative will, is the choice before all who inhabit the earth." --UHJ POWP.
People of all nations proclaim not only their readiness but their longing for peace and harmony. Attainment of this ideal will enable all people to set in motion constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and conflict.