Harming None, How far does it really go?

This is a question often asked frequently by both seasoned and new witches alike. The answer is, it has no limit unless you stop it at where it started. A person calls someone a name or enacts some road rage because someone wasn’t paying attention. The person who wasn’t paying attention gets angry, goes home, and ends up taking it out on their spouse, who in turn, takes their frustration out on their kids, and the kids end up carrying that frustration to school, where the cycle continues. Harm can truly have no limits. It is like a snake, feeding on each person it comes into contact with, making it longer, and longer, shedding it's skin, and growing large enough so that it can devour others. Harming none is a wiccan law, that each wiccan must take to heart. Harming none is so much more than what the ten commandments of the christian bible say. Sure killing someone is harm, stealing, lying, ect, but for us, it runs deeper, so much deeper.

Harming none, means, you attempt to live a life of doing the least amount of harm you can. That includes in the way you treat people, treat animals and the world in general around you.

A man throws the plastic wrapper to a six-pack of beer out the window on his way home, a turtle comes along and gets stuck in it, the turtle was pregnant because her movement is now reduced further, she can’t move, she is trying to cross the road, now…. She has been run over, the eggs, and the life, are all affected by the harm a man did by throwing out litter.

Another example of harm. Racism. As a health care professional, and working in surgery, I can tell you, when the skin is peeled back, we are all the same color underneath. A single derogatory word or act, not only effects that one person, but their family, their friends, and their community. The same thing is going on currently with immigration. Yes, people should come into our country legally, but what about the people fleeing terrorism and want a better life, just as our ancestors did when they fled other countries? To use the bible, a quote that is in it, says the immigrants should be treated as your equal, that also is in ancient pagan lore. To treat the outsider with kindness, otherwise, you spread the seeds of discord and fear.

As Wiccans, we are to do a life of no harm, while some of you may not have the gift to see into the future, you still have to figure out another aspect of harm. When we go to vote, how much harm will our political figures do? Will they harm the environment by rolling back environmental protections? If they did? How many people became sick, or came into contact with cancer-causing agents because of the lax? How many crops were effected that caused a food shortage? Will they treat foreigners unfairly? Will they cause a war, a famine? Are they prejudice? Will they insight violence indirectly? While yes, some may not use divination or have visions to help guide them when they vote, you still have to realize that your vote, can also be a form of harm, and how far did that harm spread?

Harm is like a snake…. Will you let it grow and eat others? Or will you attempt to cut the head off in your own lives before it leaves you, and goes onto someone else? Or the planet?