Disaster Opens the World’s Heart

As I write, the world is pouring out its heart to the survivors of the Haiti earthquake.  I watch, stunned at the magnitude of the devastation and awed by the magnitude of the generosity this tragedy has elicited. Something about natural disasters brings out the best in people. Perhaps this is because we would want others to treat us with compassion were we the ones in desperate need.

Having

keep reading...

Americans Played for Suckers Frank Rich’s column, Tiger Woods, Person of the Year in the New York Times is a brilliant dissection of how  Americans  have been scammed by con artists of every stripe from Bernie Madoff to Ken Lay to real estate agents who brokered bad mortgages.  He draws dots between apparently unconnected social events and ends with President Obama’s current political plight.  Many Americans are disenchanted with him because they have been hyped and spun one too many times. A Con Artist is Nothing Without an Easy Mark How is it that we have been taken in so easily and so often? We need to look more deeply at ourselves, and ask why we have been conned so many times.  There is some connection here, I think, between our ability to be truthful with ourselves and our ability to create a more peaceful nation and world. When someone lies to you, whether it’s your cheating spouse or some flimflam huckster selling gew-gaws, we know deep down in our guts that we are being lied to.   It may be a voice in your head that says, “He/she is lying to me,” or it may be more subtle, a feeling of unease somewhere in your body, but something inside is telling you, “Something is wrong here.” Silencing the Voice of Truth Within This is our inner truth-meter in action.  It’s trying to tell us to listen, to take action. The problem comes when we ignore the promptings of this inner truth teller.  We suppress the message of our inner self because we have some fantasy, need, or old belief that we have been taught about how we ought to behave, which conflicts with the promptings of the truth teller.  And so we betray ourselves, give in and buy the house with the big mortgage we can’t afford or that get-rich quick scheme the investment salesman is touting.

keep reading...

The Partisan Divide in Our Country Worsens The first signs of the current partisan divide occurred during the 2008 election.  I hoped that division would go away once candidate Obama became President.  That didn’t happen, and within months the divisive ranting grew from a rumble to a roar.  How did the joy of the victory on election night turn so quickly into dark and vicious rhetoric? From the birther movement to the Tea Parties to the popularity of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, I tried helplessly to understand what was going.  Mostly I was just scared.  The notes of hysteria in the rhetoric, the barely suppressed racism, and the ever-present possibility of violence terrified me.  Having lived through three assassinations in the 1960’s and seen a nation divided by the Vietnam War, those bitter days were and are still vivid for me.  I did not want to see blood in the streets again. A Win-Win Solution Appears in the Transpartisan Alliance I was familiar with the Transpartisan Alliance, a group that has been working for several years to unite Americans across political divides. TA seeks to include all positions and points of view with the underlying premise that all perspectives are needed in order to find win-win solutions. Our current politics is completely saturated with a win-lose, attack/fight approach that is exhausting to participants and to the public. Having focused their work on the national level for some time, TA is now shifting its attention to grassroots political organizing.   When the first Seattle TA meeting was held in October 2009, I was present.

keep reading...

Returning after Nine Months Absence Peace By Design is back.  I am back. It is good to write those words.  I stopped writing this blog in March 2009.  I did not know If I would ever write again.  I only knew I was bone-tired and could not go on.    I no longer knew what peace was or how to achieve it.  How dare I write about it from that weary place? Where have I been last nine months? Good question!  I worked at my job as a psychiatric nurse but the rest of my life was up for re-invention.  Not working actively at peace, and specifically, not writing, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  The critical voices in my head shrieked  that I should be writing now! As if I, single-handedly, could save the planet with my writing.  Could it be that resting was more important than writing?

keep reading...

Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy. Working with Time. Directed and Edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer. Director of Photography: Mr. Riedelsheimer. (2001).

keep reading...

A Big Change is Coming When I created this blog in April 2008, I announced my intention to publish regularly on Tuesdays and Fridays. I have lived up to this commitment over the past year. Together, my guest bloggers and I have produced over one hundred blogs about peace. My vision of peace was, and is, one of possibility, of what could exist on this planet, if enough people chose it consciously: a world filled with joy, fun, abundance, a world that worked for everyone. This would be a world where violence would become less and less relevant. War would gradually disappear as human beings began to shift their thinking, their listening and their speaking about peace, war and armed violence.  What they intended with the full force of their will, would come to pass.

keep reading...

Name Calling Frenzy After President’s Speech to Congress In the middle of the worst financial crisis in memory, President Obama gave a powerful and masterful speech to Congress and the American people last week. The speech received rave reviews from American citizens. Yet since the speech Republican leaders and media figures have been ranting and issuing calls for revolution and calling the President every name in the book. The rhetoric verges on hysteria. Name Calling From Both Republicans and Democrats–Why? What is going on here?

keep reading...

The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life.  by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA. 2009 The Three Laws of Performance is not the kind of book I usually review on this blog. Written for an audience committed to improving the performance of business organizations, it might be hard to see what this book has to do with creating a peaceful world. I have also written about transformational peacemaking and shifting the conversation about peace and violence in the world. The ideas outlined in this book, though oriented toward the business community, are eminently transferable to the larger challenge of creating change in the international geopolitical arena where war, terrorism and genocide take place.

keep reading...

Stop Trying to Fix the Economic System:  Re-invent It The world’s economic system is in free fall.  President Obama and his team are hastily applying fixes, hoping they will work, as are world leaders, but no one really knows how to put humpty-dumpty together again.  This started in the U.S. with a mortgage crisis. The first reaction of the Bush administration was to bail-out Wall Street.  It has only occurred to a few that a complete re-invention of our whole economic system is needed. Now is the moment to create a system that works for everyone. David Korten’s New Book is a Must-Read David Korten  has written a new book called Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth (Berrett-Koehler Publishers: San Francisco, CA, 2009), a must read for those of us studying current fiscal events.  This book is particularly important for those starting to see the relationship of money to violence and wondering how to create a sustainable planet, one where people are free to love each other, where everyone can grow into a ripe old age. Wall Street Creates Phantom Wealth–Let it Go With advanced degrees in business from Stanford, and years of experience in business strategy and economics, Korten knows what he is talking about.  The central piece of his thinking is that Wall Street creates phantom wealth.  The wealth the financial industry creates is hollow; it is not based on anything real in the world.  A giant house of cards, built up over the past thirty to forty years has suddenly collapsed.  While large numbers of people in that industry enriched themselves and lived like kings, middle and lower class Americans, and others like us around the world paid dearly for those luxurious lifestyles.

keep reading...

Australian Wildfires Caused By Severe Drought, Possibly Global Warming The recent wildfires in southern Australia have presented some of the most horrific images in memory, made all the more so by the news that some of those fires were deliberately set by an arsonist.  200 or more victims had little chance to escape the fiery inferno because of the severe drought that has ravaged Australia since 2002.  More than a few scientists attribute this drought, in part, to global warming.  We are just beginning to see the terrible impact of climate change on human beings. Global Warming Will Cause Sea Levels to Rise Over the next century global warming will continue and human beings will see more hurricanes, floods storms of all kinds, but most critically, the melting of polar ice and the rising of sea levels. As the seas rise, coastal areas that are now inhabited will be flooded and whole populations will have to move-islands like the Maldives, Bangladesh, even large cities like New York City and Los Angeles may be submerged.  Large numbers of people will be on the move, in search of new homes, perhaps new countries.  With huge numbers of people migrating you have the ingredients for conflict, a perfect storm of conflict. Displacement of People Equals Perfect Opportunities for Conflict I have even heard it suggested that as the world warms, people will migrate to the colder areas of the world, like Canada and Siberia. Think about that. How happy would Russia and Canada be to welcome huge numbers of people migrating to their countries?

keep reading...