A World in a Dramatic State of Change                                                                                                          The winds of change are whirling ever faster on our shrinking planet. If we could grasp why so many people around the world are caught up in deadly conflicts with each other, ones which cost so much suffering to so many, would we want to know that? I spent a week in intensive study in Boulder, Colorado recently, sponsored by Spiral Dynamics Integral with the primary exponent of the Spiral Dynamics theory, Don Beck. The Missing Piece for Peacemakers? On of the main challenges for peacemakers is that we tend to apply one size fits all solutions. If you bad people (terrorists or bad governments, take your pick) would just stop your violent ways, the rest of us could live in peace.

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 Change and the Resistance to Change What is change? Why do some of us resist it?The theme of change in the current political campaign has gotten me to thinking about how human beings are separated by their attitudes toward change itself. I sit firmly in the welcome change camp but it was not always so. For years I resisted change. Only a lot of pain and suffering made me, finally, clamor for change. Something had to be better on the other side.

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Americans today are divided, polarized by political and cultural schisms that are wide, painful and deep. The nature of the issues that divide us are social, cultural, political and religious. In some ways it feels as if we are living in two different countries, depending on where you live and how you describe these schisms and how you vote. The simplest description of this division is to separate the country into the so-called red states and blue states, that is that people in those states vote overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic depending on how they feel about certain cultural or social issues. We can pretty much predict that most people who are pro-choice vote Democratic and most people who are against same sex marriage vote Republican. No surprise there.

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