 For years I've been writing about religion and in whatever tradition I'm writing and whatever subject I'm taking up, I kept being brought back to compassion, whether it was a history of God, a history of Jerusalem, even a history of fundamentalism. This kept coming back. Every single one of them had, at its core, what's often called the Golden Rule, never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself. Every one of them insists that this is the test of true spirituality. And yet, you never hear about it. One of the main tasks of our generation is to build a global community where people of all persuasions can live together in harmony and respect, and the religions with this ethic should be making a major contribution. And yet they're often seen as part of the problem. So I worked to create, craft, propagate, and launch a chart of a compassion to recall religion away from all the doctrines and the peripheral things back to this so that we could address these severe problems in our time. Because it seems to me that, frankly, unless we learn to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, both within our own societies and globally, worldwide, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we're not going to have a viable world for the next generation. But I take it your answer is an idea can be a deadly serious thing. If people simply embrace ideas, that's enough. Then it translates into action. We just need to take the idea and say, now let's do something with it. Let's run with it. Now, one of the things we've done is we're creating a network of compassionate cities. Seattle declared itself the first city of compassion in 2010. And that doesn't mean they're saying we are compassionate, but they're putting compassion on their radar. And they've got a shadow city council whereby they shadow what's going on in terms of homelessness. They bought the community together after a dreadful shooting accident in the city just last year. And each year, the city works on a particular practical issue. And it raises awareness. It brings compassion back from the lumber room of our mind and puts it back into the forefront. We have now to be activists in compassion, as other people are activists in hatred, and to find imaginative ways of achieving this and making it realizable. I like the city's campaign because it's trying to insert compassion into the gritty urban heart of our 21st century civilization.