If a Tree Falls…

If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? What if the tree was the largest and heaviest of all the trees, crashing faster and harder than any tree before it?

We have more intellectual capacity in our society than ever before, yet the same issues of misunderstanding and hatred between caste, creed and religion continue to burn deeply into our humanity as they have for millennia.

The felling of 12 Parisian trees roared throughout the forest with a thunderous boom that rattled the very roots of its existence. The felling of 2,000 Nigerians trees echoed but only a whisper. The forest did not feel the pain of these falling trees; trees that were of a different color from the other side of the forest, but trees nonetheless.

All the reason and thoughtfulness in the world cannot solve our problems alone because we share in common only our unreasonableness. The common denominator between people is not the intellectual, but the emotional. We may not think the same but we feel the same.

Our greatest writers and philosophers may succeed in amplifying the sound of each and every falling tree, but what have we done to make the forest listen?