By acknowledging our shared responsibility and asking our children for forgiveness.

                                         Dear Children,
Forgive us for dividing our society instead of seeking connection. Connection is your nature. Division and racism are what you have been taught.

Forgive us for having abandoned you too often.
Forgive us for passing on our own pain and anger.

Forgive us for forgetting that you, as young people, experience the world differently from adults. That in your world, danger can feel exciting and “cool.” That, as a young person, you may feel invincible within it because this is what you have learned from the many violent films and games we created for you.

Forgive us for forgetting how powerful our thoughts are.
Every thought is a seed that shapes the world. Forgive us for consciously and unconsciously planting seeds of fear, division, and violence, and for passing this reality on to you, only to then blame you for the consequences of the world we handed to you.

Forgive us for always pointing at others instead of looking within ourselves.
Forgive us for creating weapons, drugs, games, and ideas that destroy lives and pull you into them.
Forgive us for waging wars and shaping policies from which we profit, while valuing children’s lives less than profit.

Forgive us for placing wealth above connection and relationships.
Forgive us for so often failing to give you a safe place where you can learn that you are valuable and equal as a human being.
Forgive us for so often following the crowd instead of listening to our hearts.

Forgive us for dividing ourselves into left and right, and for forgetting the middle path, a path we ourselves have shattered through hatred and self-hatred.
Forgive us for refusing to realize that, in doing so, we have blood on our hands.

Forgive us for believing that hate must be fought with hate.
Forgive us for dimming our own inner light—and yours.

Dear Child,

Wherever you are in the world, forgive us for all that we, including myself, have fallen short of, and for which you are now experiencing the consequences. Please forgive me.
I am sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.

These words come from Ho'oponopono, the well-known Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness, in which we learn that we are all responsible for the reality we live in.

Taking this responsibility brings healing, peace, and reconciliation, and with it, the possibility of a different kind of society