Book Review: The Practice of Peace.  Harrison Owen.  Open Space Institutes, Bellevue, Washington, 2003. usa@openspaceworld.org                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Humans Can Accomplish Amazing Things Together Now that Hurricane Gustav has passed, the people of the U.S. are beginning to appreciate what didn’t happen in New Orleans. Three years after the horrors of Katrina, in the days leading up to Gustav’s impact on the still-recovering city, what we saw was a marvel of well orchestrated and coordinated activity by local, state and federal authorities determined to  safely evacuate it ahead of time.

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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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