With a heavy heart and in deep suffering for the people struck by the violence of wars, harassment and abuse, and powerless for great actions, my most frequent thought has been: what can I do?

I know we must, as a species, make decisions to survive ourselves. From the beginning, human coexistence was shaped by different disputes, armed or not, and, along with the planet’s resources, relationships were worn down.

Looking at the history of our species, I see that much damage was done in the name of something: of power, command, possession, belief, domination. When I set aside all sociocultural and political considerations, I am left frozen on the question: why? That question joins the first, back in the first paragraph.

Entire groups of humans were dehumanized to serve the interests of a few. Entire groups were decimated in the name of the beliefs of a few. Multitudes were exterminated by a few who proclaimed themselves co-owners of the planet.

We are thinking beings, capable of reasonableness, altruistic by nature. Children, especially those who have not been hurt, are able to see other children without the harmful filter of power, prejudice and belief.

I think (though with a painful tightness in my heart) that the cruel, the prejudiced, the murderers, the manipulators, the liars, unless they are severely ill, shelter within themselves a wounded, distrustful, lost child. That wounded, lost child learned a violent code of survival. It lost too early the reason to trust. One of an infant’s first survival tasks is to establish trustworthy bonds of safety with caregivers. The consistency of those caregivers promotes what will become trust or distrust. Unable to trust, the child fights for its space in whatever way possible, at the expense of whatever shows up.

Consistency, coherence, care, diligence, attention and patience, together with food, public safety, education and peaceful coexistence, among other aspects and dimensions, are fundamental and mean, in the immediate present or the distant future, survival with collective awareness and the joint construction of solutions.

There are wounded children in adult bodies who cause unbelievable messes out there. Intent on narcissistic interests, they find no occasion to do differently. It turns out that these infants can be, and are, in positions of command. In this social setting of incoherence and inconsistency, adults do not devote themselves to the simple and multidimensional task of guiding a child on the journey of living and, in this way, perpetuate the harm.

Wounded children in adult bodies do not know how to act collaboratively.

Providing an environment rich in stimulation and validation, a space of stability and emotional safety in which children can flower into their human capacities, is the mission. Each child is a possibility in progress. Not to meet parents’ narcissistic wishes, but to take the lead in cooperative life on the planet. As parental figures, in whatever configuration, we can look at each human project of a person (at children) with a sense of newness.

Each child is unique and unprecedented, and can create new lives that are just as unique and unprecedented. We cannot, in our parental mission, carve the little ones according to the perceptions of our own inner wounded child. We cannot keep the planet’s children from experiencing life in its many dimensions.

At times, armed with a powerful megaphone, I feel like calling adults to a revolution in reverse. In the name, exclusively, of a generation of humans that does not need to kill, steal, extort, humiliate, exclude, marginalize, harass or exterminate other humans. That uses the resources of power (whatever they are) to create more life, and not for domination.

I share my hope here: if many adults devote themselves lovingly to the human project of guiding children, we will have, in the future, many adults who will resist violence. Those adults will trade competition for love.

The Earth may, who knows, gain a little more time to live.

We can start by doing a little every day, until unconditional human love recovers the lost ground. Our species is exhausting itself in hatred. We need to recover through love.

Illustration: Vinícius Sgarbe.