United We Stand Survive

Dear Readers,

Parsi Times’ first issue of 2017 welcomes you into the New Year, hoping it brings you endless happiness, success and prosperity. The new calendar year awakens and instigates the planner in us – there’s always such an infectious, palpable element of hopefulness and excitement in new beginnings. In our minds, the start of the year marks the much needed opportunity for self-redemption – getting back into the groove of action towards starting or completing the resolves that either never took off or were simply procrastinated. And it feels so good to be back on track, albeit temporarily, but that is the magic of the first few weeks of the year – the honeymoon period of all resolutions.

As Parsis, one of our primary identities as individuals, is our sense of community. And the identity and survival of any community depends on the unity within. Today, we find ourselves at the losing ends of both – identity and survival! Our ancestors left us the prestigious legacy of being regarded as the community that symbolizes peace, civility and progressiveness. That’s changing. And the diminishing trend in our numbers shows we are headed towards extinction. Let’s not do a Donald Trump in our heads – climate change is not a conspiracy theory, it is a stark, life-threatening reality. And us Parsis, are truly on the verge of dying out.

Unity is the need of the hour. More than ever, we need to bring in and practice unity within our community, to effectively restore our community’s crumbling image, but more importantly, to ensure its very survival. Amid all the annoying and repetitive cacophonic discord emanating under the guise of politics or religion or whatever-else-have-you, the greatest underlying need of the community today, is its survival, and we will not survive without unity. Unity does not call for us to agree on everything – in fact, there is no greater proof of a community’s sense of unity, than the fundamental belief of agreeing to disagree. Shouldn’t have to be so hard, considering we are one of the world’s most progressive and educated communities… but the history we’ve been building over the past year not only negates that notion, it violates our legacy.

Unity is a divinely precedent. It is the solution that will heal the soul of our community. When the mind unites with the universe, there is peace. When the body unites with the mind, there is good health. When different minds and hearts unite, there’s friendships and families. Unity leads to progress and prosperity on all levels. Fighting off any physical disease – be it a fever or a cancer – calls for all of the body’s faculties to unite and vanquish the ailment collectively. So also, when the disease of discord threatens the survival of our community’s identity, can we not be the soldiers who unite to fight this evil? Unity is the platform that will birth all our community’s solutions – especially the one that will restore our survival and longevity.

So let’s make Unity our Community Resolution for 2017, and work towards it with unconditional and unstoppable resolve. Let’s go down in history as visionaries who rescued our community from imminent extinction, not a people whose myopia outlived their survival. United, we survive!

Have a good weekend!

-Anahita