An Acrimonious Bitter Election Divides the Nation The nastiness of the current political campaign is the worst in living memory. It has felt to me, at moments, that the nation is coming unglued . I have been disturbed at the rage and hatred expressed by people on all sides of this election. My concern is not with who wins, because whoever wins, we will cope with it. My concern is rather that we will not deal with the fear and the rage that is underlying this animosity.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Polarizing Cultural Changes Swept Through U.S.

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The Lives of Others.  Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmark. (2006) Starring: Sbastian Koch; Ulrich Muhe; Martina Gedeck.                                                                                                                                                               Daily Life in a Police State This film takes us back to 1984 in East Berlin in the GDR, where the lives of ordinary people are overseen by the state police, the Stasi.  A virtual Orwellian state exists to watch over the people to insure that no one deviates from the party line, and that no one escapes to the west. One of the bureaucrats in the Stasi, Captain Wiesler, is assigned to eavesdrop on the lives of a playwright, Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend, Christa Maria, a well-known actress.  This couple are successful in the artistic world of the GDR but constrained in what they can write. The actress, unbeknown-st to her lover, is being sexually abused and blackmailed by a high government official.

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Let’s think about this together. One might say there is the Old Conversation or the old way of looking at war and peace and now there is a New Conversation. The old way of thinking says “War will always be with us” and “There is nothing we can do to change the violence in the world.” It says, “We must defend ourselves from attack,” and, “You have to retaliate for attack or you look like a wimp.” You can go on and on with these examples. We all know this rhetoric. We all grew up on it, and not just Americans. It is a world-wide conversationand it’s thousands of years old.

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There is a universal longing for peace and yet we never seem to achieve it despite our longings and good intentions. We are pervaded with cynicism and a deep-seated belief that war will always be with us because, well, “that’s just how humans are.” The intention of this blog is to start a new and very different conversation: that peace is possible if we say we want it, and if we are committed to creating it so it thrives on the planet. We can design and live into the kind of world we want to inhabit. This blog is about inquiring deeply into all our conversations from the past, exploring what keeps us in a violence-filled world, the costs of living in such a world and what it would take for us to deliberately create a world which works for every one, not just for a select few. A second intention of this blog is to create a community of readers who see the possibility in the ideas presented here and who will take hold of this new idea about creating peace intentionally on the planet. Toward that end, I am strongly encouraging readers to comment on posts and to interact with me, guest bloggers and with each other.

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