Laughing as They Killed“ “They laughed as they killed,” read some reports from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I have been unable to verify these accounts but I tend to believe them.  Why do humans behave like this? Two vital questions beg to be examined: 1. Why are so many young people so easily engaged swept up into terrorism such that they become mass killers? 2. What will it take to eradicate terrorism and create a safer world?

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                                                                                                   Divided Conventions, A Divided Nation  Watching the Republican and Democratic conventions the past two weeks has been an illuminating experience.  While speakers at both conventions made appeals to unifying the American people and to creating change, a tone of blame, derision and outright sarcasm for the “other side” was much in evidence.  In the U.S. such partisanship is thought necessary to winning elections.  It is divisive however, and ruinous when the goal is bringing a divided nation together. Skills for Bringing a Divided Family Together As someone who has paid a dear price for participating in a conflict which nearly destroyed a family, I understand how such apparently intractable conflicts work. I also understand what it takes to reconcile and I know it is possible to find peace after years of terrible bitterness and anger.  I learned many things in my journey back to my family and developed skills, all of which are applicable to making peace at the larger, collective level. One of the most important of these is the skill of seeing the world as other people see it.

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For a few days last September Americans had to face a dirty secret about our society and we didn’t want to look. We have found elegant and artful ways to call this ugly thing something else.But for a while we had to look at it directly and we didn’t like what we saw. And what we saw is that poverty and inequality in this country has a black face. Despair, death, and squalor all were black last September. That’s what came bubbling to the surface in the fetid flood waters of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina after the levees broke, after the infrastructure collapsed and after all the rhetoric and bombast and pomposity broke down. American shame was on display for the whole world to see.

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