 Good morning. Aloha, Pa. And thank you for the beautiful music this morning. It was so uplifting and inspiring. Before I begin my remarks this morning, I want to take a moment to thank the souls who put this conference together, who have been working so hard to see these days finally be here. I also want to appreciate the people who cleaned this room last night, who cleaned it this morning, and who prepared it for us to enjoy today. And I want to acknowledge the ancestors who owned this land before we did, particularly the Juanño people. Like many of you, I am agitated. I'm agitated because of blatant injustice, overt racism, really clear sexism, and general meanness towards each other. But I've been agitated about those things for a long time. What has changed is that that same agitation is now pretty widespread. What's changed is there is increasing recognition, awakening, and learning. And as people come to understand just how bad we have been for so long, people are becoming more and more agitated. The questions, the conversations are painful, and they are real, and they are exciting. We have a golden moment now, unlike at least in my lifetime we have had before, to engage in really tough stuff, tough conversations, tough learning, and to ask really important, sometimes dumb, sometimes new, sometimes insightful, and sometimes wise questions. But it's the journey that we're all in, which is incredibly exciting. We are waking up. You know, waking up is not a pretty process. And I'm talking, so Baha'u'llah, the prophet founder of the Baha'i Faith, has told us since the mid-1800s that humanity has been a sleep on a bed of heedlessness. We have been asleep. For Baha'is, these are quotations that we read a lot, and we kind of think, yeah, we're asleep, and we know that, and we know about the bed of heedlessness it's talked about often. But think about what that looks like to be slowly waking up from it, because this is not a normal eight-hour sleep. This is like hundreds, thousands of years' sleep. And for some of you who maybe can think and you're not too distant past, when you have woken up super late, like, you know, you go to bed at a normal time, and then you wake up at noon or 11, and you think, oh, my gosh, you look at the clock and realize how late it is. It's a different kind of awakening, isn't it? Your head might hurt. You might feel dizzy when you first get up. You may be a little confused, like, where am I? What time is it? What happened? And your breath will stink, and your hair will be really weird, and it's just not pretty. And when some people wake up, they wake up very confused and in a slow state, asking people where they are and who they are. Other people jump up and get in your face and say, good morning. I'm here. And they seem to forgot that they didn't brush their teeth yet, and they haven't fixed their hair, and it blows over everybody who's been awake. And that's what's happening. We are awakening from the bed of heedlessness that Bahá'u'lláh tells us we have been laying on for an extremely, extremely long time, and it is not pretty. In fact, it's traumatic. Some of you who are in psychological fields may know that in recent times, there is a new psychological term, in fact, being coined. It referred to people who are awakening right now. And I won't use the term because it refers to a politician, but there is a certain thing that's happening that is actually being clinically diagnosed in psychological terms. Many people are traumatized and confused, and we have been warned that this is the case. In a specific message to America, Shoghi Effendi spoke about the onrushing calamities, the cataclysmic forces that are to convulse human society. Being convulsed is an intense and not particularly pretty process. He says that humanity, heedless and impenant, is admittedly hovering on the edge of an awful abyss, ready to precipitate itself into that titanic struggle, that crucible, whose chastening fires alone can and will yield its antagonistic elements of race, class, religion, and nation into one coherent system, one commonwealth. The hour is approaching. When the most great convulsion will have appeared, I swear by God the promise day is come, the day when tormenting trials have surged above your heads and beneath your feet saying, taste ye what you have wrought. This is not comfortable. This is not easy. It's not peaceful. And we were told it wouldn't be. And it can't be because fundamentally we know that the whole thing has to blow up. The whole system has to change, from its foundation to its structures, to its ornaments, and everything in between. This process of disintegration must happen as painful as it is. In the same message, Shoghi Effendi says that confusion and breakdown of human institutions and the ensuing epoch during which the shattered basis, it will be upon the shattered basis of a dismembered society that is grotesque. A dismembered society is to be recast, its forces reshaped, redirected, and unified. That is how it's going to all come together, only after completely falling apart. And the thing is, there is nothing we can do about it. There is nothing we can do about it. This larger transformation, the shifts that are happening and the fundamental structures of the world, the disintegration process is a part of the larger plan of God. And it is not something that in our small daily efforts we're able to stop. But there is a lot that we can do. And there is a lot that we must do. And this is what I'll spend the majority of my time talking about in this presentation. Bahá'u'lláh has a very unique role to play. We're told, again by Shoghi Effendi, though powerless to avert the impending contest, the followers of Bahá'u'lláh by can, by the spirit they events and the efforts they exert to help circumscribe its range, shorten its duration, allay its hardships, proclaim its salutary consequences, and demonstrate its necessary and vital role in shaping human destiny. There, Bahá'u'llh, is the duty to hold aloft and undimmed the torch of divine guidance as the shades of night descend upon and ultimately envelop the human race. So we cannot stop the disintegration. We cannot stop the shadow, the darkness that will envelop the human race. But we can shorten its duration, allay its hardships, proclaim its salutary consequences, and demonstrate the necessary and vital role that this disintegration process is having in helping reshape human destiny. So we have a tremendous responsibility to do much in order to bring mercy to humanity during this very, very difficult time. The Bahá'u'lláhs believe that we have the blueprints for the New World Order. And this is rooted in the fundamental theology of the Bahá'í faith. As many here know, Bahá'u'llhs fundamentally believe that God, periodically throughout history, sends divine messengers, prophets, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, periodically to send God's word for humanity for that day. And when these prophets come, they are relevant. They are relevant to the time and the culture and the place in which they appear. And they update and apply in new ways the same basic teachings of the religions of the past. And Bahá'u'lláh has done this for humanity to today. Bahá'i's fundamentally believe that Bahá'u'lláh confirms and reiterates all of the spiritual truths of the past, but applies them to today's time in a unique way with really specific guidance that humanity needs now. And so all religions, for example, talk about love thy neighbor, love each other. But Bahá'u'lláh gets real specific about specific people who've had a particularly hard historic time loving each other and gives us guidance on how to do that. And this is the blueprint that Bahá'is are trying, failing, making efforts in order to try to apply to the world today. And this is our challenge. So to be clear, the spirit of the age has permeated globally. These concepts, Bahá'is do not have a monopoly on. They're not unique to the Bahá'i faith. But the prescription in its application is unique in the Bahá'i writings, just to give you a few examples. Race unity, for example. The world now, at least in the majority, has finally come to a place where it gets, for the most part, the general idea that melanin should not determine your inherent superiority or inferiority. If you believe that, and there's some people who do, you're on the fringes. But for the most part, humanity has come to this basic understanding. Without the Bahá'i faith, there has been this general understanding. But what has happened is that we don't know what that looks like. And we don't know how to achieve it. And the Bahá'i writings are really specific. They speak specifically to white people. Around the historic unconscious, often inherited subconscious sense of superiority that must be addressed in order for racism to end. It is specific with regard to what African Americans can do. It is specific with regard to what Bahá'i communities need to do. It is specific. And so while the general idea is now commonly recognized, people are hungry for specifics. Gender equality, again, the world has largely accepted the idea that it's kind of not nice to be violent towards women. We haven't, not 100%, but for the most part. It is now in the majority more normal than it was 100 years ago to accept that fact. And women are now agreed to have souls. It's generally accepted that we should aspire to some form of equality, but it is still very vague about what that looks like and how we should exactly implement it. But high writings are incredibly specific on this. For example, the teaching that a family, if in the very unfortunate circumstance that it must for financial reasons choose to educate their girl or boy must choose the girl. This is in the Bahá'i writings. It's specific. And we have many, many other guidance like that. Immigration, another issue. There used to be a time in our global history where people were dominating different races because that was the thing to do. It has now become generally accepted that we shouldn't dominate and annihilate an entire people. I said, generally accepted. Again, we're still learning. But on this issue of immigration, we do not, as a global community, have specifics to understand that. We do not, for example, understand what is in the Bahá'i writings around the earth, in fact, being one country and mankind, its citizens. And so we have this guidance and the question then is how do we work in our communities and in the world to try our best, not perfectly, but try our best to help bring these prescriptions to humanity and engage in social justice. Before I get into the specifics about that, I wanna make one thing clear. Affecting social justice is the primary purpose of the Bahá'i Faith, if we are confused. And then I'm gonna bore you with a bunch of quotes that clarify that. So the House of Justice recently wrote, the issue of social justice is, as you know, central to the Bahá'i Revelation. Shoghi Effendi in 1941 said, movements for social progress and social justice as long as they are disassociated from both political and religious partisanship should be supported by Bahá'is. And because we have needed a lot of clarity on this in a letter in 2001, the House of Justice said to an individual believer, yet another concern you mentioned to avoid involvement in any form of partisan political action. This principle should not, however, be misunderstood. The program of the Bahá'i cause itself operates in the political realm to the extent that it is concerned with inducing change in public policy and behavior at local, national, and international levels. And in 2008, we were told by the House of Justice, and this is particularly pertinent to the Tahirih Justice Center's work, involvement in social discourse and action will at times require that Bahá'is become associated with the development of public policy. In this regard, the term policy, like the term politics, has a broad meaning. While refraining from discussions of policies pertaining to political relations between nations or partisan political affairs within a country, the Bahá'is will no doubt contribute to the formulation and implementation of policies that address certain social concerns. Examples of such concerns are safe guiding the rights of women, extending to effective education of children, curbing the spread of infectious disease, protecting the environment, eliminating the extremes of wealth and poverty, et cetera. And because we are still confused, just a few months ago, in a letter written on April 27th, 2017, the House of Justice clarified that the principles of non-involvement in politics and obedience to government far from bringing obstacles to social change. Our aspects of an approach set forth in the Bahá'i Writings to implement effective remedies for and address the root causes of the ills-afflicting society. This approach includes active involvement in the life of society, as well as the possibilities of influencing and contributing to the social policies of governments by all lawful means. Indeed, service to others and to society is the hallmark of a Bahá'i life, that we can be and should be involved in social change, social justice, and in the development of policies. But the reality is the part of the reason, I think, and we don't have clergy in the Bahá'i faith. And so what I offer is my interpretation that others may very well have different takes on. But my reading of the Bahá'i Writings is that one of the reasons that we are not to engage in partisan politics is because it is not radical enough. We are not simply about tweaking or changing a little bit or just having like a different party or having a new bill or a new law in place in order to heal humanity. Partisan politics is not radical enough. Bahá'is are interested in the foundational transformation of the whole understanding of who we are as spiritual beings. And that's what we're trying to change. And so to work in a realm of partisan politics kind of isn't really exciting enough. It's not radical enough because we're working on something far more fundamental. Justice, for example. The Tahiré Justice Center works on two fronts. We work to alleviate the suffering because by the way, you know, disintegration when something is crumbling, there will be people caught in the rubble, there will be people inhaling toxic fumes from what's happening in the decay, and there will be shards of glass spraying and there will be people who are hurting and people who need help. And we're told again and again in the Bahá'i Writings that we need to be a source of mercy and what the Tahiré Justice Center does is it protects and heals and helps women and girls who are fleeing human rights abuses. But we are also trying to do this other stuff around helping to influence law and policy. And our system is fundamentally flawed, our justice system. It's flawed because it's adversarial. And it's flawed because you need money in order to get justice. And that should not be. Justice is a divine right. Justice is the best beloved in the sight of God and it shouldn't be accessible only if you can afford a lawyer. And I should excite my lawyer. I don't hate lawyers. But I think there's a problem with some of them and the system in general. But we have to work on two fronts and so the system is this way, we need lawyers and we need to provide them to people who can't afford them in order to have justice. But then I am also working in legal aid, think tank, justice circles, legal services corporation and others in order to blow up the system. We are having conversations about why do we need lawyers anyway. In order to access justice, we should not be gatekeepers to justice. And there's a fundamental inequity that should no longer continue. That will take a long time I think, but it is a fight that we need to fight. So, we know that we have a lot, we know we can engage, we know we have to engage, we know what will not be pretty, we know what will be painful. And so how do we then engage? And this is where I'm gonna get really, really specific. My understanding of the Baha'i writings on partisan politics and what I have gleaned from it is that we have about six rules. I'm sure there are more. But I think in kind of linear ways, which is not always good, but in this instance I found six that I will talk about. And the bar is high, kind of painfully high, particularly right now for the period of time that we're living in. So, the first one is that we actually have to obey people and authority. And it doesn't matter what we think about them, or their sanity, or their personality, or their actions. We must obey our government and our leaders. Bahá'u'lláh said, what mankind needeth in this day is obedience unto them who are in authority. Bahá'u'lláh said this even as Bahá'u'lláh was prescribing a takedown in the whole system. What mankind needeth in this day is obedience to them who are in authority and a faithful adherence to the cord of wisdom. The instruments which are essential to the immediate protection, the security and assurance of the human race have been entrusted to the hands and lie within the grasp of the governors of human society. So, it's even more. We must not only obey, and this is number two. We must not only obey, but we must wish our government well, publicly, openly, without hesitation or sarcasm. We must wish our government well. The only exception is in the instance where we are pressured to deny our own faith. Abdu'l-Bahá says, we must obey and be the well-wishers of the government of the land. Regard disloyalty unto a just king as disloyalty to God himself and wishing evil to the government as a transgression of the cause of God. Abdu'l-Bahá lived at a time when despots were rampant. Dictatorship was the norm, and this is what he said. The third point of guidance is that we must not even discuss political affairs. Abdu'l-Bahá said the irrefutable command is that the blessed perfection hath given in tablets that the believers must obey the kings with utmost sincerity and fidelity, and he hath forbidden them to interfere with all political problems. He hath even prohibited the believers from discussing political affairs. Now, we don't have confession in the Baha'i Faith, but I'm gonna confess right now that that's hard. Number four, we should not judge as just or unjust. How our government, we should not just, sorry, not judge, just or unjust, our government, and we are warned that if we do it, we'll cause disunity. We're told, we are not the ones, as individual Baha'is, to judge our government as just or unjust. For each believer, would sure behold a different viewpoint, and within our own Baha'i fold, a hotbed of dissension would spring up and destroy our unity. We must build up our Baha'i system and leave the faulty systems to the world to go their own way. We cannot change them through becoming involved in them. On the contrary, they will destroy us. Okay, number five, we cannot judge how they came to power. So in a letter on behalf of Shogye Effendi, he said, we cannot start judging how a particular government came into power. And therefore, whether we should obey it or not, this would immediately plunge us into politics. We must obey in all cases except where a spiritual principle is involved, such as denying our faith. For these spiritual principles, we must be willing to die. Okay, number six, rule of engagement, is we cannot ridicule those in power. We cannot debase or belittle them. It is not for Baha'is, the Universal House of Justice says, in offering social commentary to vilify specific individuals, organizations, or governments, or make attacks on them. Indeed, the guardians specifically cautioned the friends against referring to political figures in their public remarks, at all, whether in criticism or in support. So we must do this not only to avoid political arguments, but also for the maybe more important reason, which is that to ridicule any soul at all is to demean the human race because we are all one family. Oneness means all of us. Specifically, Abdu'l-Baha said, even though we find a defective branch or leaf upon this tree of humanity, or an imperfect blossom, it nevertheless belongs to this tree and not another. Therefore, it is our duty to protect and cultivate this tree until it reaches perfection. If we examine its fruit and find it imperfect, we must strive to make it perfect. There are souls in the human world who are ignorant. We must make them knowing. Some growing upon the tree are weak and ailing. We must assist them towards health and recovery. If they are infants in development, we should minister to them until they attain maturity. We would never detest and shun them as objectionable and unworthy. We must treat them with honor, respect, and kindness for God has created them, not a Satan. They are not manifestations of the wrath of God, but evidences of his divine favor. God, the creator, has endowed them with physical, mental, and spiritual qualities that they may seek to know and do his will. Therefore, they are not objects of his wrath and condemnation. In brief, all humanity must be looked upon with love, kindness, and respect. For what we behold in them are none other than the signs and traces of God himself. All are evidences of God. Therefore, how should we be justified in debasing and belittling them? Uttering anathema and preventing them from drawing nearer unto his mercy. This is ignorance and injustice, displeasing to God. For in all his sight, all are his servants. And we need to mean this. I wanna just share very briefly a story personally. I and my work at the Tahiri Justice Center have been regularly humbled by meeting people who because of the news and newspapers, I should not like. And then I go into meetings and had one a few weeks ago, located near Pennsylvania Avenue. And I was shocked by the humanity of this person and the deep interest in learning. We were explaining to this person things that, I wish someone in his position understood, but he didn't. So we were explaining what undocumented means, what illegal means, what the immigration process in fact is people's constitutional right and legal right to apply for protection in the United States. And at one point, we were going on and on, he was listening intently, he was nodding, he was asking probing questions. And then we had a little bit of a break in the conversation and he said, stop. I'm shaking and you're blowing my mind right now. And I'm feeling really overwhelmed by this truth and I'm realizing I have been wrong. And he said I need a Diet Coke. And it was weird because it was a little bit mid-sentence of our mid-sentence. And we stopped and he got a Diet Coke. He came back, talked about how much he loved his grandchildren and then said, okay, tell me again what's happening to children at the border. He was awakening. He will not be a saint overnight. I don't know if policies will change right away, but what I know is that we are all human. And that we all are on a process of search and learning. Now, there are different people who have patience and the ability to teach at different times. But everyone is worthy of being talked to and learning. Okay, so how do we practically speaking navigate this line? Which right now is harder than it has ever been before. At the Tahirah Justice Center for over 20 years, we've been with relative ease able to both in optics and in substance remain a nonpartisan organization, have the respect of both parties. At one point, we received a call from a Republican committee saying they were gonna give us an award for helping quote unquote male order brides, women who are suffering abuse from men that they met through international marriage brokers. And then two weeks later, we got another call from a Democratic committee saying they wanted to give us an award. We called and explained to them that we were neither Democratic nor Republican and we refused both awards because the optics wouldn't have been what we wanted, but we were grateful they were both equally confused. And it was a line that we've been able to go down. But I would say that has become harder in recent times. It has. And so we have to be more careful and we have to be more deliberate and we have to be more conscious and we have to be more strategic. And there are a few things that we are doing. So public messaging, we're having to be careful in ways that we are not. We are having to have people who serve on our board. And I should explain, you might be wondering why do we care so much? The Tahirah Justice Center is a Baha'i-inspired organization. We are transparently and overtly Baha'i-inspired. We are applying Baha'i principles and we are clear about that. But we are not directly governed by or funded by the Baha'i institutions. We are independent. We have a separate board of directors. Most of our board are not Baha'is. Of our 72 staff, less than five are Baha'is. Most are not. All of our clients are not Baha'is and our work is done without regard to religion. Our work is done in a spirit of service. And so, but because we are Baha'i-inspired and we're trying to apply these principles, we have this obligation. The week after the election, just this past year, and it was coincidence, it wasn't on purpose, we gathered all of our managers who came from all four of our offices, Houston, San Francisco, Washington, and Baltimore. They came to Washington for a management team retreat. And the first day was hard. There was a lot of emotion. And one of the management team members who was not a Baha'i said, in moments like this, and particularly as a Baha'i-inspired organization, I want to ask that we go back to our scripture because we need centering. And she was right. And I was like, why didn't I think of that? And so I spent that night, stayed up late, pulling together all the Baha'i computations that I could on the issues that we needed to deal with. And we sat there in like a Ruhi book, study circle style for two hours the next morning, reading these quotations and just talking about them. And then we said, okay, now it's time to get back to our strategy and what are we gonna do on our programs and on our policy advocacy. And one of the management team members who was particularly in pain and particularly emotional and feeling rage, an incredible emotion after this moment of reflection and deepening started the conversation and said, I did not understand how we could remain nonpartisan and do this work, but now I do. Now it is clear to me. All that matters is the oneness of humanity and that is the job of the Tahirih Justice Center for the next four years. And so we know that we can be centered in seeing the bigger picture rising above the petty partisanship that exists, the frustrating laws and policies that maybe we see and we can focus on what's important. We can focus on oneness. We can focus on unity. We can focus on collaboration, consultation, on listening and collaboration building. But the bar is high. We have to be very careful. Our public messaging needs to be extremely careful. We are no longer signing on to letters that a lot of our colleagues are leading because of the emotion in the letter that we need to be disconnected from. We're deliberate about coalitions that we join in other organizations that optically we may be looking like. We are cautious about money we accept. I got a check, a large check from somebody who I did not know and it came in an envelope on the front of which had a picture of the Statue of Liberty in a Chador. Full kind of a Afghan looking Taliban-ish covering. On the inside, it said thank you for stopping the shariafication of America and here's $10,000. And she was speaking specifically about a child enforced marriage initiative that we have where we are protecting victims of child marriage. But in fact, most of our clients are not Muslim. They are Orthodox Jews. They are Christian. They come from a wide range but she had a stereotype in her mind about what that work was entailing. I called her and I tried to explain to her that we love Muslims and we respect Islam. And we are not in the business of quote unquote stopping the shariafication of America which isn't happening anyway and I tried to explain that to her. And she said I understand but her tone made me think that if I had seen her in person she was winking at me and wasn't completely understanding. And so I told her that we were grateful for her support but she was not supporting us for what she thought she was supporting and we would not accept her money. And there are other instances where we have done that but we need to be clear in our optics and in our substance that we are working for the oneness of humanity and we are not against or for any particular subgroup. Consultative methods and promoting them within coalitions helping to check the air of superiority that can come from people of certain educational backgrounds certain racial backgrounds and certain social justice backgrounds. There is a righteousness and a superiority that Tahir has become known for helping to moderate. And we will talk to anyone who will remain friendly to us even while some other organizations are refusing to talk. Shoghi Effendi clearly says that we can boldly and fearlessly stand up to oppression while remaining friendly. We can. This may seem strange or odd to those of us who have been raised according to traditions long established by the norms of the old world order. This was in 1941. We paused to question common approaches assumed by most social justice activists and we are deliberately mindful about internal healing. So in order to be externally nonpartisan we have to be internally nonpartisan. And there are things that we do in order to moderate that we try to create safe spaces for people to emote for people to vent. We have once a day a stretch and breathe half hour because we just need to breathe sometimes. We have paid for therapy every single staff person at Tahirah can go see a therapist for free because some of us need that in this work. And when something catalytic happens we voluntarily offer a moment of prayer people gather together whether it's black men who are suffering in Baltimore that particular day we all gathered for two hours just to pray. There are moments when we need to pause and feel the pain of what's happening around us and if we don't do that work internally it will seep out and agitate it in frustrating ways. We integrate into our training of staff how to be nonpartisanship. We have a five point guidance for our public communications that need to be adhered to in order to be nonpartisan. We teach consultation versus debate which is really hard for lawyers to learn. We deepen on guidance around racism and the respective roles that we all have to play. We have an internal staff led committee on race power and privilege to continue on a monthly basis the work that we all have to do including those of us involved in social justice work. So we know that we need to be engaged in social justice. We know that we have lots of guidelines around how to do that while remaining nonpartisan. And then I've shared a little bit about some of the experimentation on that that's happened at the Tahirih Justice Center. Imperfect, we have made mistakes, we have learned from them and we're in a process of growth like all of us. But let us be clear that the true solution is not about the political sphere or the policy sphere. The true solution is this recognition of the oneness of humanity. Shoghi Effendi says, let there be no mistake that the principle of the oneness of mankind, the pivot around all the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh revolve is no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. It calls for no less than the reconstruction of the whole civilized world. This is what we are about and what would it look like if we truly understood the oneness of humanity? And by the way, the writings when you dive into this, it's not even about recognizing oneness and the fact that I am better off if you're better off and this interconnectedness that the writings talk about, it's even more than that. We're told as Bahá'u'llh to prefer others to ourselves. It's more than seeing our interests as mutual. It's preferring others to ourselves and what would that look like? If we got that as a civilization, what would our structures look like? What would our laws look like? I get really excited when I think about it because it would be amazing what that would look like if we understood that. Might we, for example, be willing to pay 14 cents more dollar more on a hamburger so that the person making it could feed their family? Maybe we would. Would we consider the fact that a minimum federal wage of $7.25 which translates into an annual salary of just a little over $15,000 is unfair to mothers who love their children and don't wanna have to work two jobs and never see them? Maybe then we would change that. If we recognized the oneness of humanity, maybe we would walk by the locked glass case in the grocery store of baby formula and stop and think. About the fact that baby formula is the number one most stolen item in grocery stores. More than alcohol, more than cigarettes, more than anything else. And in most grocery stores, it is held behind a glass case in lock and key, the big versions of it. You can get the smaller versions in the aisles. Stop and think about that. If you are working multiple jobs, you cannot nurse your baby. You don't see them enough. You do not have a pumping station nor can you afford a $300 pumping machine in order to keep your breast milk up. And so what you do is you feed your baby formula. They are in childcare. That even you know isn't the best for them. You are not seeing them as much as you would like to. But it is your only choice. And then a tub of baby formula costs $42. And babies eat a lot and there is no choice because babies can eat nothing else. What would you do? You may steal it. And it is the number one most stolen item in grocery stores. If we understood the oneness of humanity, if we cared about others more than ourselves, we would find that intolerable. If we understood the oneness of humanity, maybe we would use less water so others could, less energy so future generations have it. Maybe we would allow our property taxes to go to other counties, to other places where homes are not so expensive and the money is not flowing as much so that children in those jurisdictions can receive an education just as good as the children in jurisdictions with big houses. There is a lot that might change if we understood the oneness of humanity and if we preferred others to ourselves. So in closing, I want to remind us that it is fundamentally the oneness of humanity that will solve all of this. And partisan politics isn't even interesting enough. It's not radical enough. There is this fundamental change in how we view ourselves that is even more exciting and more important. And for Baha'is, it also means teaching the faith. Because we're told in the writings that unless we are actively teaching the cause of God, we are sharing this message and helping people understand spiritual solutions to the ills of humanity. Divine assistance is entirely cut off and that is an exact quote. Divine assistance is entirely cut off as the phrase unless we are teaching the faith. And so if we wonder why things are hard in our lives or in our communities, if we wonder why we're not getting as much divine assistance as we would hope, we may need to be teaching more. In a letter written to an American believer in 1996, the House of Justice talks about the faith spreading throughout America and says, however, as the House of Justice has been trying to get the friends of America to understand for some time, the necessary precondition to translation of our community's social vision into reality is a massive expansion in the cause. That's a precondition. Those who fail to comprehend the urgency assigned to the objective of achieving a large expansion have obviously failed to appreciate the moral imperative behind this aim. This was a letter written to an individual believer specifically on the subject of the plight of African-American men in the United States. So we have a lot to do, but it's gonna be okay. It'll be okay. It won't be safe. It won't be pretty. It won't be comfortable. But we've gotta get used to being uncomfortable. We've been really, really comfortable for a really, really long time. And like any muscle that has maybe a hatch your feet or is just really, really weak, the first time we use it, the first time we do all of this stuff that we've talked about, it will hurt and we will be weak because we don't have the muscles for it. We don't have the tools for it. We don't have the tools for being uncomfortable. We don't have the tools for having hard conversations. We don't have the tools for social discourse and action. We don't have tools for teaching the faith. We don't have tools for the oneness of humanity. There is so much we don't know. And the first time we use them, it will hurt like hell. And then that night, you won't be able to sleep because you'll be so in pain because of your new experiment. Your muscles will be throbbing and they'll be very sore and you might need drugs to get over it. And the next morning you'll wake up and if we're doing what we should do, we walk right back into the gym and we try again to use that muscle. And it's even more sore because we kind of heard it the day before. We're even maybe more sensitive, but it's okay. It's still growing. And we do that more and we do that more and we do that more and then we get muscle memory and we remember, oh yeah, I've been there before. We've had this conversation. Now I've learned, now I know better. Now I can do better. And we're growing and we're learning and we get strong and we get stronger but it will hurt particularly at first and it will hurt always so long as we are truly engaging and we're truly exercising. We will make mistakes and we'll have lots of opportunities to grow but that's part of the deal. And so I look forward to seeing you all in the gym. Thank you very much.