Building Team Humanity
As I write this blog, the baseball season has just begun. I’m a lifelong baseball fan and, to admit my bias, a diehard supporter of the Detroit Tigers. I live in South Florida now but the Tigers were my childhood team – in part because of 
the man you see in the photograph. Al Kaline, my baseball hero. I’m blogging about all this for a reason, of course. I have long thought that baseball offers a good example of how to live our lives. Like humanity, a baseball club requires effort by each individual member in order to do its best as a team. When one player doesn’t care about getting a hit or catching a ball or throwing out a runner, the team suffers. As has been said by many others, baseball is a team sport played by individuals. Al Kaline was a great example of that team spirit, fueled by his desire to make the Tigers win. Through that attitude, he won too – not just a World Series title but also his own special place of honor in Cooperstown’s National Baseball Hall of Fame, voted in by his peers on the first ballot. My point is this: individuals are lifted, inspired, powerfully motivated when their efforts are devoted to something larger than themselves. Like Kaline, we simply play better when it’s not all about “me.” That’s the focus of the Humanity Project – helping individuals to recognize they are part of “us.” Humanity. We believe that the only way to truly improve society is by improving individuals, just as better players create a better baseball team. And we think one good way to accomplish this individual improvement in our society is through showing people that they exist in a larger context. Then showing them how to live according to this wider perspective. The Humanity Project’s programs use this sense of social connection and cooperation to encourage children to stop school bullying, for example, demonstrating that bullying hurts everyone in a school and everyone is needed to stop bullying behavior. We are not isolated individuals but rather partners in a communal enterprise. Human beings literally couldn’t live without each other, couldn’t learn to walk or talk or eat or love. We are Team Humanity, if you will. We each are part of humanity’s struggles to become more fully human, going all the way back to our prehistoric ancestors and up through ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome and then right on to today’s high-tech age of information. It is possible to see ourselves in this broader context, much as great baseball players view themselves within the context of their teams. When we do that as members of Team Humanity, we all win.
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