After being blessed to hear Mrs. Michelle Obama's speech at the Strand Theater, in agreement with her I write the following:

The only way to get back our home life is to awaken again to our human essence. Essence means the most important part. The human value of what Mrs. Obama reiterated. Human beings don't have to look pretty, you have only to feel pretty. That is the difference. Human excellence is all about essence. Our outward being is beautified by what is established inwardly.

The Bible says: A man-woman is as he/she thinketh in their heart. If you disconnect your thinking from your heart, you won't have a life. You are on the way to death, destruction, loss of human value and loss of human excellence. One follows the other. If you lose the appreciation for human value, it won't be long before community value disappears and life will be lost also.

If the community fails, everyone in the community is to blame. We as parents, family members, leaders in the community, educators, etc. have to admit that our community has failed. We did not rise up as we should have against those things that tore down our home life, that broke our spirit inside ourselves, as a community.

We didn't say, "This cannot happen. We will not tolerate this." So we all are to blame. That is what has happened to us. Yet we can save it all. How? Just go back to human essence and human value and stand upon your human worth. Then you can bring your life, your home life, back into

Advertisement
civilization.

Civilization means progress for moral life, material life, educational life, progress all around. There is no civilization at home when you wake up and hear nothing but abusive, cheap language. It works against education. It reduces your vocabulary so that your talk, speech becomes small. It helps you stay "ignorant."

This is the day of awakening for sure. You have to wake up to prophecy, that there is coming a time when life itself, that G-d constituted, will speak out to those who have abused and mistreated life.

That is where we are now. You don't have an excuse. I don't have an excuse. It is very clear. Stay with the best that we have. Don't put down your excellence for something worse. Relief has come for all of us in one soul, Mr. Barack Obama.
----
Ahmad Seifullah lives in York.