Today is Valentine’s Day, which makes us think about love.

Sometimes personal acts can transcend political boundaries.

In the midst of a trade war that our country initiated against China, the Berne-Knox-Westerlo School district this week welcomed Chinese students.

It is easy to create stereotypes of people and to dismiss them as enemies if you don’t know them.

Eight families in the rural Helderberg Hilltowns did the opposite. They got to know the Chinese students they welcomed into their homes as individuals.

“Some of our students may never get a chance to travel to China,” said the high school principal, Mark Pitterson. “This is a good way to bring China to them.”

And so it is. We hope the program flourishes.

Our Hilltown reporter, H. Rose Scheider, had her picture taken with the students when she interviewed them. She recorded their joy at having knee-high snow. They live on Daishan Island in the East China Sea where snow never makes it to the ground without melting.

The students had no trouble communicating their thoughts and experiences with Schneider because they had started studying English at an early age. Knowing the language of another culture is an important first step in understanding that culture.

The students told Schneider that they found the American culture open and the people they met outgoing. Those, qualities, too, are essential if we are to bridge the divides that have increased in recent years between the United States and other nations.

The trip was the brainchild of Karol Harlow. We had covered Harlow during the two terms she had served on the Berne-Knox-Westerlo School Board. We were always impressed with her open-mindedness.

When the United States went to war in the Middle East, the sign on Helderberg Trail in front of the BKW schools said, “God bless our soldiers.” Harlow had a more universal idea of God and questioned why God would bless one country’s soldiers and not another’s.

In a recent Enterprise podcast, Harlow talked to us about her Baha’i Faith, which teaches the equality and unity of all people and the worth of all religions. During the podcast, Harlow pointed out the commonality among the central tenets of the world’s great religions.

Buddhism says hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Judaism says what is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. Christianity says: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Islam says: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself. And Baha’i says: Blessed is he who prefers his brother before himself.

“That is the entire law,” said Harlow. “All the rest is commentary.”

In her own life, Harlow said, she is guided by the principles of unity and educating others about those principles. “How can you teach lack of prejudice if you don’t practice it?” she asked. She concluded, “It’s one heart at a time. It’s one thought at a time.”

When Harlow worked as the principal at Germantown High School in Columbia County, she conducted student exchanges there. She decided to bring the idea to BKW and worked with school leaders to make the program a reality for the Hilltowns where she lives.

“I would like the think this is only the beginning of the good will that our small community can foster with families and children on the other side of the world,” Harlow wrote to us this week. “This morning, I asked one of the Chinese boys what was the best thing about his trip so far.  He said, ‘The family I am staying with. They love me and I love them.’ I don’t think it gets better than that!”

Neither do we.

If individuals can connect with one another across political walls, we have hope for the future of the world.

If people from different cultures can understand the common humanity we all share, we may avoid the destruction of our Earth, which looms large in an era when nuclear treaties are being abandoned or ignored.

We recently saw the documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old,” created by Peter Jackson with refurbished films taken during World War I and, most strikingly, the voices of old soldiers, recorded in the 1960s, telling of their experiences as young men — many of them boys, really.

One man tells of learning that England and Germany were at war. He was at a banquet for rugby players; German players were seated alongside English athletes at the same table.

When the news arrived, he briefly wondered if he was meant to pick up a knife and stab the athletes sitting next to him. Instead, the rugby players decided, the war would start tomorrow. The banquet went on.

Toward the end of the film, the exuberance of those who had enlisted and donned uniforms with eagerness faded to a dull drumbeat of survival as the documentary focused on the intrantrymen in France, on the Western Front. Iconic footage of No Man’s Land — the desolate terrain of barbed wire and burned trees between the trenches — has, after awhile, a numbing effect.

So, too, the repeated pictures of a group of live soldiers, posing before battle — close-ups so you can see their faces and almost feel as if you know them — interspersed with shots of slain soldiers — limbs blown off, holes in their hearts or their heads. Again and again and again.

We had to close our eyes.

By the end of the film the voices of the old men say that they really didn’t hate the Germans. They saw them as young men, like themselves, who had been drawn into a war that was bigger than they were.

Erich Maria Remarque in his novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” drawing on his own years as an infantryman in the German army, comes to similar conclusions as those spoken by the old men who had fought from trenches on the other side.

The novel is narrated by Paul Bäumer, fighting on the Western Front. After killing a man in hand-to-hand combat, Bäumer watches the man dying, in pain, for hours, and finally asks his corpse for forgiveness. He is devastated and feels great remorse. “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure,” Remarque writes, “for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”

The American Field Service, made up of volunteers, many of them from colleges or universities, drove Model T ambulances to the front lines to retrieve the wounded and bring them to sites where they could be helped.

A. Piatt Andrew, inspector of the ambulances, had argued that the volunteer drivers wanted “to pick up the wounded from the front lines… to look danger squarely in the face; in a word, to mingle with the soldiers of France and to share their fate,” as Arlen J. Hansen relates in his book, “Gentlemen Volunteers.”

What those AFS volunteers saw on the battlefield led them to found the student exchange program between foreign countries that flourishes today. Over our decades at The Enterprise, we’ve interviewed both students and teachers who have come here from all parts of the world through the AFS exchange.

Always, we are struck by the way individuals relate, are welcomed into families, are loved, and build lifetime relationships — all in spite of the politics that may pit one country against another and lead to war.

The destruction of World War I was made more brutal by modern inventions for war — the gas, the flamethrowers, the machine guns, the aircraft.

In our times, when world powers hold enough nuclear weapons to destroy humankind, we need, more than ever, to reach across the widening divides at our borders to find our common humanity.