by Guardian in Chief Richard A. London
Given in the Blue Star Memorial Temple
September 13, 2026
According to one of many traditions throughout the world, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began this weekend. As a Jew, I was raised to believe that our world was created 5,787 years ago. According to the Old Testament it would be some 1,500 years later when there was an attempt to build the Tower of Babel, which continues to serve as a cautionary tale about the limits of human achievement without obedience to God. The Tower of Babel also symbolizes human pride, divine authority, the origin of linguistic diversity, and the foundation for the dispersion of nations.
While the age of our world remains debatable, if humanity is ever to know an unflawed version of the type of cooperation involved in initiating the attempt to build the Tower of Babel, there will need to be a reckoning with “the Resiliency that Comes from Unity in Diversity.” I’ve been trying to grasp this concept ever since a midlife change in my career some 40 years ago. It was a recalibration of my “point of view” that eventually ended up with me working at our local United Way for 23 years.
I’ve come to believe that resiliency is key, if not vital, to a thriving and sustainable system, be it individual or community. While being so affected by the ever-hastening evolution of technology and its significant influence on what many of us think, say and do, coming to terms with the unintended consequences related to the behaviors, actions and impacts on our ability to make a living, continues to be challenging at best.
As with most aspects of life, there are the micro and the macro points of view that invite consideration. Therefore, it can be helpful to keep in mind the differences between individual and systemic resiliencies, along with their respective requirements, challenges, and interdependencies. This is a complicated, if not a daunting concept, which may make more sense to me intuitively than it may make by my articulation of my thoughts into words. On the other hand, from an unbiased perspective, its simplicity may be revealed.
When I think about how one’s motives and values are the ultimate lens by which we perceive and interpret, I find myself becoming more concerned with what appears to be an ever-decreasing supply of open-mindedness within various groups of our society. My intent here is to explain the necessity for resuscitating our humanity by means of the formula (CPR) 2. Quite frankly, I’m merely resculpting that same-old lump of clay that has already been refashioned untold times by those who have wrestled with the age-old dilemma between who’s right and what’s right.
Looking back, before the United Way movement began using the “Live United” slogan, locally we were using “Unity in Community.” While Live United still resonates with me, it’s no secret that an angry mob knows how to Live United. So how we live united underscores just how foundational our values and motivations are to the ways and means we choose to get along with each other and how we find the Unity in Community.
As we continue a worldly outward transformation from less homogeneous to more heterogeneous communities, I would suggest that we all need to increase our understanding about the inevitability of “Unity in Diversity.” Slowly, but surely, more of us are coming to terms with the concept of diversity as a universal principle woven into the very fabric of all life.
United Way’s origin goes back to 1887 in Denver, Colorado when a Rabbi, two Ministers, a Priest and Frances Wisebart Jacobs, the only woman amongst them, chose to improve the lives of individuals within their segmented faith-based communities. They did this by collaborating to mobilize and build bridges between their historically siloed “powers for caring.” Back then there were about one billion people on earth and the emerging work of United Way was devoted to safety net issues for meeting life’s basic needs within the Denver area. Today, as our world population hovers around some eight billion individuals, there are nearly 1,100 locally autonomous United Ways working under the umbrella of United Way Worldwide in some 30 countries and territories.
It wasn’t until I started working for United Way, that I realized how little I knew about its mission, despite being very familiar with its name. I discovered that during the 1980s United Way’s focus began to reveal signs of a glacier shift towards responsibility and prevention, while not losing sight of the basic need for remediation and the treatment and band-aiding of symptoms. This evolving emphasis on structural change had initiated an ever-growing awareness about the usefulness for getting to the bottom of root causes. That refocusing of the lens, remains relevant as the need for increasing proficiencies in preventing preventable problems only grows stronger. I now think of it as endeavoring to help individuals avoid the potential quicksand of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Essential to this endeavor is acknowledging the need for autonomy, creativity and spontaneity within our individual human experiences.
During my tenure with United Way, this evolving awareness was in the beginning stages of reformulating the United Way mission with a greater emphasis on what became known as the building blocks for a good quality of life; education, financial stability and health.
Not unlike Benjamin Franklin’s, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a ‘person’ healthy, wealthy, and wise,” I found this refocusing to be vital to one’s wellbeing. Clearly an early start after a restful night has tremendous value, but I can’t help to believe that our proficiency in the basics of education, financial stability and health has become even more essential these days. Under my direction, our local United Way began to increase attention to the need for more basic proficiencies in reading literacy, financial literacy and social emotional literacy by utilizing a variety of programs and activities. Parenthetically let me add that the idea of prevention still inspires a good deal of resistance.
And yet, with the ever-emerging stranglehold of credit card debt since the 1950s, with the diminishing tradition of having a single nongovernmental employer over one’s lifetime since the early 1980s, the introduction of modern universal credit scores in 1989, and the continuing volatility of the economy within various sectors, the idea of presenting a financial literacy program to classes of senior high school economic students as we were entering the 21st century, seemed to be more of a necessity, than just a good idea.
While our United Way’s financial literacy program had an emphasis on a number of best practices; the one that rose to the top was to “Pay Yourself First” (or PYF). We wanted young people to get into the habit of saving and we wanted them to start saving now! One of the key saving’s strategies we put forth, beyond saving for something in particular, was having the ability to save for a rainy-day, especially for when one has become responsible for the financial wellbeing of their family. The rule of thumb still is to have enough savings to cover three to six months of living expenses.
Today, too many of us are struggling to stay afloat and would attest to wages not keeping up with the across-the-board increases in the cost of living. According to the 2025 Federal Reserve Board Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, 37% of adults don’t have enough cash to cover a $400 unexpected expense.
No matter how we might question the way others live their lives, be it through a lack of education or satisfying their desires for things they can’t afford, there are many factors to keep in mind. For one, we as a society are being bombarded by marketing campaigns that have become enticing beyond belief, especially for our youth. Also impacting our ability to become self-sufficient may involve aspects of our ethnicity, training, and work ethic, where we live geographically and the makeup of our households. From childcare to healthcare, family budgets can be tight, with too many of us resorting to the temporary relief offered by the ease of taking on consumer debt.
Last year’s 2025 Real Cost Measure Report, published by United Ways of California, indicated that one-third of California’s working families struggle to stay afloat. The report points out the significant need for more head of household jobs and affordable housing. I mention this not to make excuses for those of us not living within our means, but to highlight the difficulties of saving for a rainy day.
According to a 2025 report by MarketWatch, more than half of American adults live from paycheck to paycheck. When a community lacks head of household jobs and affordable housing, it lacks resiliency. When households lack three to six months of living expenses in their savings, they lack resiliency.
Many of us can empathize and have compassion for the uncertainty and stress affecting those who all of a sudden find themselves without a paycheck. As necessity can be an inspiration for innovation, we can find the ways and means to recalibrate our lives, especially when we are living more compassionately, thinking more preventively and acting more responsibly.
There is no shortage of self-help learning opportunities, when it comes to being more financially literate. Many would agree that it begins with a proficiency in reading literacy. But another underlying principle in financial literacy involves our “money personality,” which is formed in early childhood.
That’s where a proficiency in social emotional literacy becomes ever so relevant. With or without awareness and intention, our values, emotions, expectations, beliefs and attitudes (or VEEBA) drive the behaviors for how we spend and save as adults. We’re beginning to come to terms with the probability that individuals who are proficient in social emotional literacy are less likely to be stressed out and more likely to have resilient autoimmune systems. It makes common sense that mental health can impact one’s resiliency for overcoming the various bumps encountered on the road of life. By living more in the present moment, we may become more proficient and responsible with how we prioritize and manage to provide for our hierarchy of universal desires.
Besides families being financially stable, we need our youth achieving their potential and for everyone to be living healthy lives. I’m fond of Arnold Glasow’s quote, “Parents can tell but never teach, unless they practice what they preach.” Perhaps Gandhi said it best, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Getting to a point made by the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families, I quote, “Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least ‘complete a high school education,’ get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.”
I mention these quotes because we as individuals need to hold ourselves accountable for the relationships between those macro and micro behaviors, if we are to nurture the resiliency that comes from unity in diversity. In my mind it is the family where the process of nurturing resilient individuals begins to nurture resilient communities and where the principle of unity in diversity begins to reveal its necessity.
As humanity’s consciousness continues to evolve, let us remember that it took centuries for some of our ancestors to accept that our earth was not flat and that our sun did not revolve around it, like our moon continues to do. History tells us that humanity can be resistant to embracing the ever-evolving enlightenment that comes through the understanding and appreciation for the “Unfolding Revelations of the Universal Realities of Life.”
I continue to look forward to more of us recognizing the life serving contradictions between our ever-expanding knowledge and the ways in which we have become accustom to living our lives. In fact, I believe that much insight can be learned from understanding how our own individual constitutions are influencing the type of health going on within our very own bodies.
For example, we need cell diversity within our individual biological universes. We need different types of cells getting along with each other in their higher forms of organs and systems, if we are to be healthy. We need reproductive diversity if we are to naturally create progeny and we need parents getting along if we are to have healthy families and for families to get along if we are to have healthy neighborhoods. For some time now, I have come to think of the cells in my body as individuals and my various organs and systems as groups of communities and of course most grateful when they are all getting along. As each cell is a self-maintaining environment dependent on its surroundings, the same holds true for me, as I too am a self-maintaining environment dependent on my surroundings.
So, for me here’s the crux of the matter. When will the masses of humanity be able to see themselves and their neighbors as individual cells within one great body?
Much of what was once common sense is being corroborated by science. Much of science is becoming common sense about the natural order of living organisms and their habitats, from the macrocosmic to the microscopic. When it comes to the various influences on the resiliency of unity in diversity, I think of all life existing within various size ecosystems, universes or environments, with these environments being reliant on and existing within other interdependent environments or habitats, all playing their various roles, in all kinds of combinations. These environments may share much in common, especially when it comes to the sun, air, water and land. I consider the three main influences on the resiliency of unity in diversity within these environments as: (1) additions to them, (2) subtractions from them and (3) the ever-evolving interdependent dynamics within each and every one of those environments.
For starters, this applies to my body, family and neighborhood. Just to go one level deeper, I consider my heart to be a unique environment, full of specialized cells that are even smaller individualized environments themselves. Metaphorically these environments are not unlike the Matryoshka dolls, those Russian wooden nesting dolls that fit ever so nicely within one and another.
By way of another macro-micro perspective, studies have substantiated that the resiliency of Yellowstone National Park (an environment) has been dramatically impacted by the eradication (or subtraction) and subsequent reintroduction (or addition) of the gray wolves.
By the wolf’s intentional subtraction or removal, Yellowstone’s natural unity in diversity was disrupted to the point where the long-term survival of its once pristine and vibrant ecosystem was actually threatened. In this particular case, it would appear that the micro lives of the wolves need to be considered a vital organ to the macro wellbeing of Yellowstone. Without the wolves, the elk population produced well beyond the natural sustainability of Yellowstone’s flora and fauna. Not enough aspen trees were growing beyond the sprout stage of life, leaving the elk with the “appearance” of being too greedy, by consuming and thereby preventing the necessary numbers of sprouts from becoming fully functioning trees. This is in contrast to the health, resilience, and biodiversity of many waterways having been diminished by the over trapping of beavers. While the beaver population was severely reduced for the commercial value of its fur, oil glands, and meat; the wolf population was severely reduced for their natural proclivity for consuming other creatures with commercial value.
Even children stories depict the wolf as the ultimate marauder. While disappointing to those whose livelihoods may have thrived by the wolf’s eradication, regrettably the motives of some ranchers and hunters would appear to be at catastrophic odds with the needs of Mother Nature. Although never promoted as a concern, I can imagine Smokey the Bear, the forest fire prevention advocate, being pleased by the wolf’s return to the environment we know as Yellowstone National Park. And now, for very similar reasons, the beaver is being intentionally added back, reintroduced into many of our waterways.
Conversely, when we look at the uninvited addition or introduction of a non-indigenous organism into any habitat, ecosystem or environment, natural assimilation can prove challenging. According to a 2025 US Forest Service website posting, the hemlock woolly adelgid, whose natural origin is Japan, is an example of a tiny aphid-like bug that is one of an expanding army of insects draining the life out of our forests from New England to the West Coast.
Various forms of organisms have found the appearance of thriving success, from one point of view, as a result of global trade and travel and their ability to hitch hike out of their indigenous worlds or environments. Human interventions with its seemingly harmless intentions have also devastated many indigenous environments at the expense of the ages required to reach a point of natural balance.
Various scenarios abound from these immigrant-like species discovering new environments with plenty of prey and no predators, giving the appearance that the adelgid is a greedy creature, if not a plague. Worst case scenarios threaten the indigenous biodiversity here in the United States without some innovative dynamic environmental intervention, not unlike an act of God. This kind of example reminds me that the United States’ founding human immigrants were non-indigenous organisms and engaged in behaviors that led to the transformation of an environment and the decimation of untold numbers of indigenous human beings and other life forms that were flourishing until our founder’s fulfilled their invasive nature. As another example of this process, here in Halcyon, we have the Ice Plant now choking out the life of other native species.
According to a March 2025 article from Earth.org, “Insects Matter. Why Are We Wiping Them Out?” ─ there are mounting reports claiming sharp declines in the indigenous populations of those useful, pesky and sometimes enchanting bugs who have served, fascinated, and annoyed humanity for nearly forever. Ironically one could argue that our world needs insects existing within their natural origins, more than people, no matter their locations, if nature is to have the kind of resiliency that comes from unity in diversity.
Also, the changing trends in weather patterns are impacting the interdependent dynamics of many environments. Despite our aspirations for space travel, I take the position that our most sacred and precious Earth, happens to be the ultimate and almighty environment for where Humanity needs to be. I have come to believe in the Divine interconnected interdependent relationships between all living things and their environments. To me, becoming more proficient at minding our own business here on earth takes precedence over sticking our nose into the business of some other planet.
How human beings behave within all environments matters. When we migrate from our indigenous environment to a foreign environment the resiliency that comes from unity in diversity may become threatened without some process for an individual and group intention to integrate, to assimilate within a receptive environment.
It makes sense to me that we can naturally fear a change in the kind of diversity we have grown accustom to and may even take for granted. The resistance for overcoming our fears of diversification by endeavoring to identify with what we may have in common has never ceased to be an age-old struggle.
To me what really changes is the dynamics within our various environments, be it too much of one thing or not enough of another, no matter the identity of the element or organism, especially when assimilating is vehemently resisted.
Selfish, reactionary and irresponsible behaviors may be leading us to catastrophic consequences resulting in a destabilization of our existence as we now know it. This can also be true, even when we are fighting for our perceived safety and self-preservation.
While I am grateful for the various conveniences afforded to many of us by our ever-modernizing world, the Balance of Nature seems terribly out of equilibrium, with too many environments suffering from diminishing vitality and not enough of the resiliency necessary for getting along. Thankfully we human beings also have the arts, sports and recreation for personal revitalization and for the enticement of diverse groups to find common ground. Yet, I continue to take pause from Dr. Neil Postman’s 1985 assertion that humanity is at risk for “amusing itself to death.”
So how does the resiliency that comes from unity in diversity apply to Humanity and does that resiliency require knowledge and acceptance of the Law of Karma?
We shall cross that bridge next Sunday with Part 2 of this Talk.
— Richard A. London, Sixth Guardian in Chief