From Celebration to Discord Watching the nation’s legislators slug it out over the stimulus package in Washington D.C. the past week has been painful.  In the end they will cobble something together but it will not be a bill that will do what needs to be done to get Americans working again. Obama’s election and inauguration were one of the highest points of celebration this nation has ever seen. Now we have descended into fighting.  What is going on? Lessons from My Own Life So I step back and ask myself, “What’s this about?”  I only begin to get it when I  look at my own life.  I have been working incredibly hard at two jobs while I also write a blog about peace, the passion of my life, and try to nurture a business in the free hours I have left.  I notice that things in my life are breaking down: my car, my computer, my health.

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Different Routes to Peace Lots of people want peace. There are different ways to get there: the realpolitik, incremental approach of diplomacy and strategic use of armed warfare. And there is the soft approach of idealistic dreamers who wish everyone would put down their weapons and be nice to each other. Over thousands of years the planet is actually getting safer. So the slow, pragmatic approach has had some success. The issue we have now  is that fighting violence with our current sophisticated weaponry is simply not sustainable for our increasingly crowded planet.

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