Letter No. 1: We Are One
I’m sitting at the desk in my apartment in Los Angeles, and everything is quiet, except for the hum of a refrigerator. I can see through my windows that it’s getting dark outside, and the New York Times and Los Angeles Times are lying on a couch, waiting to be read. For the L.A. newspaper, the front page reads, “A Wider LAFD Problem: An Aging Fleet.” For the other paper: “Costs for Americans Rise Despite Claims by DOGE.” And so it goes.
Before I started typing these words, I had been watching a docuseries about the murder of John Lennon. In fact, over the past few days, I’ve been binging on Lennon. Not his songs, but the human stuff.
It started on Saturday afternoon when I stopped zooming all over the place and sat down to watch One to One: John & Yoko, an excellent documentary about their time in New York City in the early 1970s and their activism for peace. That reminded me of The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a very good documentary that covers the same period, for the most part, and explains why the Nixon administration was going after him. I watched that on Sunday. Then on Monday, I remembered the docuseries John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial. I’m on the second episode of that.
I’m not exactly sure why I’ve been going on this binge. It felt important in some vague way, so I went with it. But it may have something to do with an idea that I share with Lennon: in so many words, he was constantly saying that we are one. After all, that’s what “Imagine” is about.
And that’s the main thing I want to bring up at the very start of my writing at Letters From Over Here. To set the tone, as it were. The “we are one” thing guides much of my thinking, and it’s one of the reasons why I started Letters From Over Here on Substack. I not only wanted to spread the word about being one, but I also wanted to create and grow a safe, inclusive global community where people can be one.
Lennon, as far as I can tell, was bringing up that idea for a very important reason: he thought it could help end war and racism and sexism and all the rest of it. That if we truly believe we are one, and act that way towards each other, it’ll wipe out war and the other nasty stuff.
But it wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky idea or an old hippie idea or anything like that. It was a very pragmatic idea – and smart.
You can see it’s smart just by looking at the reactions of certain people in power: they hate the idea that we are one, and they say anything and do anything to kill it, including trying to silence its messenger.
Certain powerful people have been using the divide-and-conquer technique for centuries, and it’s worked well for them. It’s given them power and riches, and it keeps them powerful and rich.
They divide us, get one group of people to back them, get us fighting and destroying each other, and then that gives them the ability to stay in power, making money for their buddies and themselves, one way or another.
But if we believe we are one, then divide and conquer doesn’t work, which means they’ll lose their power and everything that comes with it. That’s completely unacceptable for certain people in power. (I keep writing “certain” because not every leader uses divide and conquer.)
So far from being naive, “we are one” is actually very dangerous – for the powerful people who try to divide and conquer us.
In fact, let’s say Letters From Over Here steadily grows a community of one million people by getting folks to understand that we are one. Let’s say our inclusive, global community starts to take shape and makes some good noise in the United States and other places, but especially America because of its influence worldwide. And we keep writing at Letters From Over Here that we are one, and even more people join our global community. Certain people will think I’m dangerous, and they’ll start calling me names and try to neutralize me. If that doesn’t work, and Letters From Over Here only grows, I’ll be considered extremely dangerous by the powers that be. Then I’ll need to take some precautions, if you know what I mean.
The “we are one” thing is true, so it’s very, very dangerous for presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and other big shots of a certain ilk.
Now it just so happens that I know, for a fact, that we are one.
Years ago, I was working on a book about AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the world’s largest HIV/AIDS nonprofit. For my research, I traveled all over: Mexico, South Africa, Zambia, Uganda, India, Cambodia, China, Kenya, England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Estonia, Ukraine, Russia, and numerous cities across the United States. For one trip, I went around the globe in twenty-nine days, talking with people who were poor and middle class and working class.
By the end of my research, I had talked with more than 200 people – all kinds of people. It became absolutely clear, with no question whatsoever, that we are one. (I wrote about it for an essay that was published at our old home on Medium.)
Something else became clear when I traveled all over: power structures operate pretty much the same everywhere, and they rule through divide and conquer. That was another thing that got me: divide and conquer was worldwide! I also saw that many people take cues from what happens in America.
So how do we overcome divide and conquer? By getting people to understand that we are truly one, and then we reject leaders who rule by divide and conquer. (You always know you have a good leader when he or she doesn’t try to divide and conquer.)
When I look at what’s happening in the world right now, not just the United States, I can see a lot of people falling for the old divide and conquer. It’s easy to fall for it. Even well-intentioned people fall for it. In fact, I have to catch myself, now and then, from falling for it. I have to stop for a second and breathe and think. Then I go back to the fact that we are truly one. I make a decision to not allow myself to be divided and conquered by the powerful people who want to conquer me. I refuse to allow them to do that. Because 1) I want to be free (mind and soul) and 2) we need to fix things, and we can’t seriously fix things if we allow ourselves to be divided and conquered.
The “we are one” thing is important. It’s one of the best ways, if not the best way, to get out of the mess we’re in. There are other things that need to be done, but it’s a crucial starting point. We are one.
P.S. You can start spreading the word about “we are one” by sending this letter to people and/or posting it somewhere.