‘I will.’  Two little words that mean so much.  Most of us remember our marriage vows, other will remember resolutions at the turn of the year or promises made to friends or teachers.  ‘I will ’

What we sometimes forget that a promise made is a debt unpaid and that keeping promises is sometimes much more difficult that we expect.  Easy to say but often hard to do, ‘I will’ requires a conscious commitment that can sometimes be washed away in the sands of time.

We are all brought up in the context of a belief system, and there are many of them. Each of them requires an ‘I will’ response which we carry consciously or otherwise through our lives. Despite this cultural mind-set we drift from what were once our core values.  We compromise the resolutions of our youth, we break our promises and often forget the ‘I will’ which was the bye word of our forefathers.

Internationally, do many nations to uphold values?  Do the great alliances EU or NATO and the UN have the collective will?  Despite them all, we watched passively the horrors of Bosnia, Srebrenica, Rwanda and now Syria and Yemen.

Now there seems to be suddenly accepted lack of collective will.  The will of the people is to avoid conflict even when war crimes are committed day after day whether in Yemen or Syria.  When children die and mothers starve, and hospitals are bombed, there is no will, no promise of humanity upheld.

Being reliable and sticking to our core values requires an act of the collective will, and to exercise that will we need leaders who will carry the weight of our consciousness and our belief of what is right.

‘What is right’ is sublimated too often into ‘what we want’ which is seldom coincident, when what we want is so often driven by greed, malevolence or even just self-protection. If there is a vacuum of ‘good will’ then that malevolence will win.

Is there someone, somewhere, who will lead us and say ‘I will stop the carnage’, ‘I will do what’s right’ simply because I believe in humanity?