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“The Greatest Night in Pop” is a must-see Netflix documentary.

It tells the story of the night in 1985 when the greatest singers in the world at the time came together in Los Angeles to record the song, “We Are The World,” whose proceeds helped feed hundreds of thousands of people dying of starvation during the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85.

The crème of the crop in the music world, including behind the scenes technicians, these men and women spent one very long night working on a recording without any compensation that raised over $160 million (today’s market).

The song itself that Michael Jackson and Lionel Richey wrote captured the motivation that led them to do such a thing:

There comes a time
When we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
Oh, and it’s time to lend a hand to life
The greatest gift of all

Heeding a call to lend a hand to life, the greatest gift of all.

What a vision!

We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me

Why do this? For one simple reason, the song says:

We’re all a part of God’s great big family
And the truth, you know, love is all we need

Indeed, what a vision, what a hope, what a willingness to set aside everything about ourselves, their fame, their prestige, their egos, and come together to hold up a vision of a world where unity rather than division, hope rather than despair, love rather than hate, reigned.

As I look at our country in this election year, I wonder if we are still capable of living out such a vision captured in the lyrics of the song Michael and Lionel wrote.

Are we?

It’s not a rhetorical question. Millions among us here in the United States are following a very disturbed man whose every word contradicts the values expressed in “We Are The World.”

What has happened to them that has led them to such a dreadful point where they are willing to agree with the caustic, divisive, angry, woe-is-me message Donald Trump spews every time he opens his mouth or writes a tweet?

The question has no single answer, or any clear answer at all.

The good news, though, is that the vision that we are all one and that answering the call to help one another, including saving our own way of life, can prevail in spite of those drawn to chaos and division.

All it takes is for the majority to see, truly see, how precious the gift of our collective life is, the greatest gift of all, as the song says.

The old and true saying that people sometime don’t realize what they have until they lose it is challenging us again.

I have no doubt that if every radio station in the country played “We Are The World” at the same moment just as the world did on March 28, 1986, most Americans would be genuinely moved by it once again.

Most of us want to live in peace, to help our neighbors in need, to experience harmony and joy together. Most of us believe in unity without uniformity, capitalism restrained by justice and equality, in freedom with responsibility.

That’s the vision “We Are The World” held up to the entire world, but that vision is now under threat, under threat by every American who is ready to give power back to a man who has never believed in the vision in the first place.

Because it is, none of us can escape this moment in history when what we do will determine the kind of future our nation and world will have.

None of us. The spotlight is on us, the challenge is before us, the decision will be made by us.

So all of us must decide how we will respond to the words that inspired the U. S. and the world almost forty-years ago:  

There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me

Will we? is the question. Will we make that better day with the choice we make in November, or will we let that vision fade into the past, gone forever and with it any hope for all of us being part of “one world.”