The Tragedy of Ukraine and New Thinking

As we lock horns with the cruel and out-of-touch Putin, once again we’re at a moment that too closely resembles the Cuban crisis of 1962. We really don’t seem to have learned very much since then. Sixty years is a long time not to have figured out that nuclear chicken is a game with no winners.

While some pundits assert that it is NATO’s expansion to the East that has caused Putin to react so irrationally, others explain that, no, his mind is somewhere back in another century, caught up in imperial fantasies of renewed Russian glory. Some argue that by not enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine we are slipping into an appeasing Hitler model, making WW3 more likely. Others argue the opposite, that we must avoid WW3 by the kind of delicate and creative restraint presently practiced by Biden and Blinken. 

In our helplessness we all want to at least have an opinion and even better to be right, but we sometimes fail to understand that the lead-up to war, escalation, is a system in which all sides participate, with roots in historical grievances and fears extending into the distant past. We project malign motives onto Putin and he projects malign motives onto the U.S. and NATO. In this projection we act in unawareness of our own darkness, conveniently forgetting that the U.S. too has attacked sovereign nations when we thought it was in our interest.

The nuclear nations are so based in power competition that so far—even after Cuba—they have not awakened to the possibility that their fundamental interests are compromised by the threat of annihilation. They refuse to see their shared interest in building a security system based in no one needing to possess WMDs rather than one that incentivizes every nation to want them.

Here are parts of a response to me (I had asked about nuclear policy) from one of our most intelligent and thoughtful U.S. senators: 

“ . . . as long as nuclear weapons exist, the potential use of these weapons cannot be ruled out, and the maintenance of a safe, secure, and credible nuclear deterrent is our best insurance against nuclear catastrophe. . . 

. . . malign actors who seek to upset global peace and security must remain convinced that the costs of attacking the United States—or our allies and partners—far outweigh any benefit they seek to derive. This policy, in fact, has prevented the use of nuclear weapons for over 70 years. .  .

. . . I fully understand the apparent paradox of the theory of deterrence—that we must build, maintain, and credibly prepare for the employment of these awful weapons, all in order to reduce the chances of their use. Until we achieve a nuclear-free world, this is almost certainly our best insurance against the nuclear catastrophe all of us rightly fear. . .”

These words can fairly be said to represent establishment thinking across Washington (and Moscow and Beijing). The problem with this thinking is its spirit of fatalism. It gives lip-service to the hope of a nuclear-free world, but other than that, no specifics about how to get there or how crucial it is to get there. And there are gigantic questionable assumptions: first, that the deterrence system is safe and secure, which assumes no mistakes forever—a bridge way too far—and second, that our weapons are good and non-threatening but the weapons of others are bad and are a threat.

Such reasonable-sounding but ultimately empty rhetoric indicates a collective mind-set that has been, to put it bluntly, stuck on stupid since the Cuban crisis. We can do better. How? 

First, accept reality out loud. There is no way out of the nuclear deterrence paradox, which is not “apparent” but all too real. Unless we actively change the paradigm, nuclear war lies ahead somewhere down the time stream, possibly within days or weeks in the present crisis, or within years as further conflict inevitable rises. Governments need to say, as I hope the United States government, to its credit, is saying to itself right now, first principle, nuclear war is off the table: how else can we respond? 

Second, have some faith in our own creativity. Is the “tragic realism” of nuclear deterrence really the best we can do? Most nations don’t think so—86 are signatories and 59 have also ratified the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The U.S. can make significant unilateral confidence-building moves, including former Secretary of Defense William Perry’s suggestion that we can retire our entire land-based ballistic missile system with no essential loss of security. Or bring home a Trident submarine to base and invite others to make similar small gestures of good will.

Third, the community of nations can prioritize the issue far more, by activating an ongoing conference of the nine nuclear powers through the U.N., or as many who are willing to participate, to take small steps in the right direction, starting from the premise that we never want to be this close to nuclear war again. Let’s not freak out about bad actors like North Korea. If suddenly the U.S. and NATO possessed zero nuclear weapons and North Korea made hostile moves, our conventional forces would be more than sufficient to deter their acting rashly. Verification of violations is no longer a technological hurdle, and we are finding out just how powerful economic sanctions can be when applied uniformly. Sanctions can become a far safer and more effective means of deterrence.

It is hardly my place, sitting safe in a warm house in rural Maine, to advise the Ukrainian people that they might have been better off had they chosen Gandhian forms of active nonviolent resistance. Zelensky himself has pleaded with the Russian people to do so, and his own countrymen and women have tried standing bravely in front of Russian tanks. Though Ukraine understandably has chosen to take up arms in response to Russian brutality, nonviolent tactics must never be forgotten, because they often work quite effectively, and can still be effective to creatively combat Russian occupation. The expert tactician of nonviolent political struggle Gene Sharp has suggested 198 ways to refuse cooperation with occupiers, tactics with a successful track record in Poland, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict published an expanded list last year.

Meanwhile we are desperate for a new paradigm where leaders turn to international institutions like the World Court to adjudicate difficult conflicts—as Belize and Guatemala have done to resolve an ongoing dispute about borders. Yes, many schemes have been tried and have failed, including the Kellogg-Briand treaty to outlaw war from 1928—which is still in force by the way. But the nuclear context adds the greatest possible urgency to the deliberations of diplomats and leaders.

Meanwhile one of the most galling aspects of Putin’s invasion is its utter irrelevance to any of the real problems the planet, including Russia itself, faces together. While Ukrainian suffering is horribly real, Putin’s nationalist motivations seem unreal, belonging to some other moment of historical time when the world was not challenged by transnational challenges like pandemics, the climate emergency, finding adequate clean sources of energy, and feeding all the children of the earth.

Our New Normal

 

Putin’s cruel invasion of Ukraine reminds us that there are leaders of countries—and not only Putin—who think and act according to the conviction that if they do not get their way, they might turn to nuclear weapons as a last resort. Or in the fog of war or extreme tension, someone might misinterpret events, beginning nuclear escalation inadvertently. The record of the Cuban Missile Crisis makes clear that we were fortunate to have Kennedy as President of the U.S. and Khrushchev leading the U.S.S.R., because they secretly negotiated a peaceful way out of the crisis, even as U.S. generals were pushing hard for an invasion of Cuba that would have resulted in global holocaust.

 

The brutality of Putin’s indiscriminate attack upon helpless civilians has appalled the world, but we still need to put ourselves in his shoes as best we can. He’s on record that the breakup of the old Soviet Union was a disaster, one that requires the restoration of the Russian Empire. In addition he is an autocrat who feels threatened by the Ukraine becoming a successful liberal democracy with strong economic and political ties to Western Europe and the U.S., whom he conceives as a single combined adversary. Historically, Russia has been invaded many times, in recent history by Napoleon and Hitler, and has responded to instability at its borders with consistent force—as we in the United States would also if we felt that our own stability was threatened by chaos at our edges. A further complication is the ethnic distribution of Russian-speaking or Russian-leaning citizens in the Ukraine, with more of those to the East and less to the West of the country, creating a web of contradictory loyalties—even as Ukrainian identity has been solidified by the invasion.

 

Anxiety, angry helplessness, moral outrage, blaming, and enemy-imaging would seem to be “normal” responses, along with “what-aboutism”: the U.S. also launched invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan and a number of other countries which many of us saw as unnecessary or unjustified. Putin himself has used what-aboutism to rationalize his choices.

 

The level of violence available to the nine nuclear states means that nuclear cataclysm would not lead to victory for anyone. In this new world, normality and even sanity depends upon knowing that my survival depends upon the survival of my adversaries, and their survival depends upon mine. To the extent that enough people—citizens, media, Putin himself—lose this sense of existential interdependency, we will keep moving closer to catastrophe.

 

Which is why the International Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons has worked so hard to get more nations to join the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—the only way to permanently end the nuclear possibility which will keep raising its head with every new great power conflict. Though 86 nations have ratified the treaty, none of the 9 nuclear states have signed on, indicating that those nine still think that nuclear weapons, possessing them, threatening to use them, or actually using them, are indispensable to their survival, when the exact reverse is true.

 

Which is also why a truly “normal” response to our planetary situation would be hundreds of millions of people in the streets demonstrating not only in favor of Ukrainian independence but also for the permanent prohibition of nuclear weapons, and for using the savings that result to  build a sustainable world.

 

War is a huge distraction from the unprecedented degree of planetary cooperation we must learn in order to address the climate emergency. Sadly, such cooperation is the opposite of the way Putin has chosen. Along with nuclear weapons, climate change equally makes the case that the new normal is that my survival depends upon you and yours depends upon me. This reciprocity, appearing in all the world’s great religions as the Golden Rule, far from being an impractical ideal with no relevance to great power conflict, has instead become, in the form of the twin nuclear and climate challenges, our fundamental planetary reality—our new normal. To the extent we learn to act from this understanding, a different world is possible.

Have Mercy

 

As  the Ukrainian people endure horrors that are all the worse for being absurdly unnecessary, it is difficult to avoid  pondering the most horrific absurdity of all: if Mr. Putin is unhinged enough to launch a barbaric war, would he, in the same deluded spirit of grievance and paranoia, actually consider using nuclear weapons?

 

It’s been 60 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Robert McNamara admitted we got through not by diplomatic skill but by sheer good luck.

 

Pull out into space a few hundred miles and look down on the radiant curve of the blue earth, and then look back in time. This small home of ours coalesced over billions of years from the energy of the stars into matter, followed by the miracle of life, then conscious life, then the Axial Age, when great teachers like Buddha and Jesus taught the means by which humans could further evolve and discover meaning and fulfillment together. Then, very recently, a great global war where a supremely evil anti-Semitic autocrat failed to develop a nuclear weapon and was defeated. And now this moment, where another equally deluded dictator controls thousands of such weapons.

 

Beyond Putin's megalomania, beyond whether NATO raised tensions by expanding toward Russia’s borders, beyond the greedy delight of arms manufacturers worldwide, the Ukrainian invasion demonstrates the immense harm humans can do when we try to take upon ourselves the authority that belongs to Reality itself.

 

What is conveyed by capitalizing the word Reality is a truth that is too big for authoritarians like Trump or Putin to comprehend, let alone control: the Reality that we’re all in this together renders obsolete the national borders that obsess Putin—and obsessed Trump when he was in office.

 

Reality: a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought. Any possible strategic usefulness of nuclear weapons is cancelled out by their world-destroying power. If Putin understood this, he would not be making nuclear threats. But U.S. presidents have also made such threats in the past, so a little humble capitulation of our own to Reality would be welcome. Reality: pandemics do not care about national borders, and must be fought globally. Reality: there’s a global climate emergency that demands that all nations cooperate on a new level.

 

 Putin, still admired by his tin-pot understudy Mr. Trump, is doing what autocrats do: distracting his citizens from economic pressures, pandemic challenges, and internal forces for democratic reform, personified by the imprisoned Navalny. Putin sees a democratic Ukraine, or any democratic state bordering Russia, as a threat to his autocratic rule, just as the Chinese government sees a similar threat from Taiwan. He is trying to divert the gaze of his citizens outward toward an external enemy—at the moment, supposed neo-“Nazi” Ukrainians in thrall to foreign agents who are trying to undermine Mother Russia.

 

As tensions ratchet up, it only takes one cycle of misinterpretation to slide sideways into nuclear escalation. If we manage to avoid WW3, and the nuclear powers finally join with the majority of nations to ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, perhaps in the future the International Court of Justice will adjudicate the kinds of supposed injuries that enrage Putin. If such a case came before the Court, a ruling might come down that affirmed Ukraine’s autonomy but would decree a peaceful referendum in the two Russian-leaning provinces in Eastern Ukraine on whether to rejoin Russia.

  

American “credibility”, Chinese “face,” or Russian “autocratic authority” only have meaning in terms of how credible are pledges to sustain the biosphere and feed people, such as those starving in Afghanistan.

 

Life’s continuity on our small planet requires our respect for, acceptance of, surrender to, the Reality of interdependence. For the love of God, Putin and all those who control nuclear weapons: have mercy on the Earth.

Brief Dispatch from Belize

 

I've been in Belize with my partner so we can spend time with her son and grandchildren who live there. The pandemic had kept everyone apart for a couple of years. Covid is present here too of course, but this is an obediently mask-wearing culture. The police will fine you for non-compliance. The Covid death rate is way below the U.S., where hundreds of thousands of shouting fans continue to pack our football stadiums cheek by jowl for the Superbowl playoffs.

 

Meanwhile Belize provides no escape from the news cycle. As investigation into the roots of the Big Lie of a rigged U.S. presidential election deepens, a completely different Big Lie continues to muddle global superpower conflicts: the Lie that enough military force can ensure security.

 

The nuclear superpowers, confronted with how to respond to each other at points of tension like Ukraine and Taiwan, are certain that readiness for mass nuclear murder will deter rivals and help them get their way.

 

But it is becoming more obvious by the day that the pandemic and the climate emergency have forced a radical change in the meaning of security. As Tom Friedman pointed out in a recent column, while Putin masses tanks and artillery along the Ukrainian border, in a distant part of his empire the frozen tundra is not only thawing, in places it is on fire, releasing methane at an ever increasing rate.

 

The popular film ”Don’t Look Up” satirizes the world’s refusal to take climate issues seriously, using the blunt metaphor of a giant comet headed straight for us. But the film’s broad mockery of our refusal to take our heads out of the sand could apply also to the superpowers’ obstinate reliance upon nuclear weapons to back up diplomatic demands. Nationalistic saber-rattling, let alone war itself, cannot protect us from pandemics, temperature increases, mass migrations, and food shortages.

 

The eco-theologian Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “noosphere” ( no-oh-sphere) to describe how we humans, with tools like the internet, are creating an intricate neural network around the earth—a further layer of connection to complement the biosphere of air, water and soil we share. Yes, the power of the web has been sullied by hate and misinformation, but overall people are trading and talking internationally in a way which recognizes the reality of our interdependence even more than world-destructive military force tries to deny it.

 

Before the presidential election back in November, I was privileged to chair a couple of zoom meetings between Rotarians in various cities in the U.S. and Canada with a Rotary Club in Yekaterinburg, some 900 miles east of Moscow. In my ignorance, I had a picture in my head of Yekaterinburg as a raw metropolis of endless gray concrete apartment blocks. I was introduced instead to a modern city with an efficient subway system and shining examples of both historical and contemporary architecture. Poof went my obsolete stereotype.

 

We were further struck by the answer when we asked the Russians what might be their most pressing concern. Their worry turned out to be identical with ours: would America find a way to get beyond its polarization? Our agreement went beyond obsolete nationalist conflicts and we became momentary world citizens of the noosphere—the only possible foundation from which can spring the cooperation that is demanded by our many trans-national challenges.

 

Belize is about the size of Connecticut, and is the least populated country in Central America. About a third of its entire territory of jungle forests and coral-reefed islands is preserved in conservation. With abundant sunshine for a solar-based economy, it has the potential to be a world leader in moving toward sustaining the living system which supports our lives.

 

Belize itself has been dealing with a serious border dispute with Guatemala that goes back decades. Did the two countries go to war? No, they each held referenda asking their populations if they wanted the International Court of Justice to adjudicate the dispute. The citizens of both nations voted yes, and the Court is deliberating.

January 22 Marks the One-Year Anniversary of the Moment Nuclear Weapons Became Illegal

January 22 Marks the One-Year Anniversary of the Moment Nuclear Weapons Became Illegal

 

Winslow Myers

 

The corporate-military-political complex that continues to renew the arsenals of the nine nuclear nations represents a colossal failure of imagination.

 

Everyone knows that a nuclear war cannot be won, that the weapons are strategically useless, and that they are a catastrophic world-ending accident waiting to happen.

 

Everyone knows that the trillions spent on these weapons along with boondoggles like the F-35 Strike Fighter are heartlessly siphoned away from the fight against Covid, acute hunger in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the climate emergency—let alone decent pay for day-care workers.

 

If nuclear catastrophe happens, say the optimists (when it happens say the pessimists), anyone who survives will cast a searching look upon the whole rotten system that fostered such a monstrous end to the human effort to secure itself on the planet. Some will want to assign blame, assuming enough institutional structure remains to replicate the conditions of a Nuremberg-like court of judgment, but that worthy effort would come too late.

 

Let us choose optimism and posit that disaster can be averted. We then find ourselves between two paradigms, the first where war has often been the first resort in conflict and always looms as a possibility behind diplomacy, and the second where everyone understands the no-win reality of the weapons that requires eliminating them and evolving a different kind of global security system.

 

Whatever form such a system might take, a world federation, a renewed United Nations, or a major upgrade in prestige and publicity for diplomatic processes, is less important than the simple education of all the citizens of the planet to the reality of our situation: we must change or die.

 

The extended moment of the paradigm shift may be, as former Secretary of Defense Perry has ceaselessly warned, the most dangerous time of all, where nuclear war is even more likely than during the Cold War. But the risk of continuing to drift is far greater than the risk of efforts, like those of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and countless others, to eliminate these world-ending weapons.

 

Global conflicts remain complex and of course not principally caused by the weapons makers, though it is clear that the arms race is fueled by greed, and its inertial momentum immensely complicates diplomatic efforts to resolve conflict short of war. Nuclear weapons overshadow the points of tension involving the nuclear superpowers, including the Ukraine (Russia vs. NATO, Taiwan (China vs. the U.S. et al.) and Kashmir (India vs. Pakistan).

 

A relatively small number of people, heads of government and of large corporations along with diplomats, hold the fate of the earth in their hands. In the United States Congress should hold hearings where members of this elite group of nuclear strategists can be held to a standard of absolute clarity—justifying to American citizens why they need to spend above a trillion dollars to renew our arsenal, and why they refuse to consider the will of the Earth’s people:

 

86 nations are signatories to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. January 22 will mark the one year anniversary of the date the treaty became international law. Nuclear weapons are illegal, immoral, and useless.

All Together Now

The less than ideal outcome of the latest climate talks in Scotland reminds us of an inconvenient truth: as yet there is no human authority on Earth powerful enough to enforce the preservation of the commons. Would any country seriously consider military invasion to stop Brazilian deforestation, up 22 percent from last year, or India’s continuing addiction to coal, or the U.S. auctioning off new leases for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico?

 

This lack of authority to enforce global agreements necessary to human survival also sadly weakens the fragile international institutions that are intended to help us get beyond the scourge of war, especially nuclear war, and beyond our third great challenge, global pandemics. As the courageous Greta Thunberg bluntly put it, it’s mostly “blah blah blah,” rationalizing a status quo that isn’t working.

 

With nuclear weapons, military force has reached a level of destruction which contradicts its own professed goals. Let alone that the arms race has become grossly irrelevant to our environmental and health crises, though it can still extinguish us even more rapidly than eco-degradation or plague. The deterrence system represents the utter opposite of the universal Golden Rule of interdependence found in all the world’s great religions: if you try to destroy me you will die trying. 

 

The autocratic leadership of figures like Putin, Trump, Orban, Assad, or Erdogan demonstrates the limited conception of self-interest dominating our international cultural and economic structures from top to bottom, including polarized rivalries within democracies.

 

Sea level rise in Miami will flood gilded Mar-a-Lago as surely as the humble homes of hotel maids and fast-food laborers—giving a new meaning to the biblical “rain falling on the just and unjust.” If nuclear war ensues, prosperous arms manufacturers will be vaporized and irradiated and nuclear wintered along with the rest of us. And we have seen how Covid can infect presidents and humble front-line workers alike.

 

We’re either on track toward general hell on earth—or we are in a time of perturbation that heralds a paradigm shift. To what? To a world build upon the truth of our radical interdependence with each other and the living system.

 

We humans have so much more in common now than what divides us because our own security and health depend on the security and health of our adversaries. We can criticize the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs and the Chinese can criticize our corporate prisons, but even the contest between autocracy and democracy now nests in the context of the threatened commons, requiring a level of cooperation that transcends our critiques of each other’s systems.

                                                                                       

Noah Harari estimates that we need invest only 2% of global G.D.P. to achieve full sustainability and head off the worst effects of climate. More and more countries are realizing how acute the need has become to prevent nuclear war, and they are ratifying the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, leaving the nine nuclear powers increasingly on the wrong side of history. And if we truly realized the urgency, the so-called “advanced” nations would mobilize our medical resources against Covid just as we mobilized for two world wars.

 

There are interesting proposals out of China for a super electrical grid that would connect continents, allowing wind and solar energy to be available even to the side of the earth turned nightly away from the sun. Would it be such a terrible thing for projects such as this to strengthen the bonds of interdependence—even between, especially between, adversaries?

 

Cynics and skeptics should check out indications showing that Americans are much more open than it might appear to innovations in global governance. But where deep change needs to happen, there’s no substitute for building agreement on principle. One principle that applies to all our challenges: our true self-interest lies in the common good, local and planetary. Whatever form our future takes, as a Peace Corps volunteer once wrote, ”the Earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We’re all on the same side.”

 

A Second Civil War?

 

 

I believe the Second Amendment, whatever the Founders meant by it, was never meant to result in a nation with more guns than there are people, and that it is common sense to license gun ownership in the same way we require a license to drive. You may believe that the Second Amendment is a fundamental bulwark against tyranny and reject any limits upon weapons.

 

You may believe that abortion is murder but capital punishment is not. I believe that abortion is serious and tragic, but still it is better that it be safe, legal and rare. I believe capital punishment is cruel and unusual and has been too capriciously and unjustly applied.

 

I believe that the scientific method, posing a hypothesis and testing it to see if it is true, indicates we are in the midst of a human-caused global climate emergency that will take a new level of cooperation among all the nations in the world. You may believe that the science of climate shows inconsistencies and that warming and cooling are natural cycles independent of human activity.

 

You may believe that wearing a mask during a pandemic is an intolerable encroachment on your freedom. I believe that freedom includes willingness to give up smaller freedoms for the greater freedom of the common good.

 

I believe that Donald Trump was the laziest, most self-serving and dangerously demagogic president in the history of our country, whose final tweet on January 7^th (“Remember this day forever!”) nailed his responsibility for the Capitol riot—or at least for not trying to stop it; you may believe he was authentic, tough-talking, good for our pocketbooks, and actually won re-election.

 

You may believe that Black Lives Matter is an incendiary and exclusionist movement. I believe that what Blacks have suffered here through slavery, Jim Crow, lynch mobs, and unfair treatment in housing, education, business and the law makes race the central theme of American politics and the ultimate measure of our failure as a country so far—and also of our future success if whites can finally acknowledge their privilege.

 

I believe that structural racism built into our culture by our history infects all our institutions, including the police, and deep police reform is required—not defunding, but more funding for training and mission clarification. You may believe that the police are only trying to do an almost impossible job as best they can and deserve uncritical praise for keeping us safe from extremists on both the left and the right.

 

You may believe that easy voting methods such as mail-in ballots will lead to fraud and put the Republican Party at a disadvantage. I believe not only that current technology can make voting convenient and safe from fraud but also that voting in national elections should be required.

 

I believe that the U.S. Senate as currently structured is flawed, paralyzed, and a hotbed of the rankest hypocrisy and corruption by special interests. You may believe that a few powerful senators are holding the line so that the nation gets the judges it needs to hold the line against widespread cultural decadence.

 

You may believe that Rush Limbaugh is a beacon of light in a gathering darkness of chaos and change. I believe that it was a travesty for a sneering hatemonger to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

I believe that nuclear weapons, far from keeping us safe, are a useless abomination and our country ought to lead the world in negotiating them out of existence. You may believe that nuclear weapons are an efficient way to prevent further war and the more we possess the stronger we are.

 

You may believe that because living expenses are different in different parts of the country, a universal minimum wage doesn’t make sense.

I believe that a national $15. minimum wage is the very least we can do for millions of people struggling to make ends meet. We can even subsidize it to make life easier for small business owners—for example with money we save by not renewing our nuclear arsenal.

 

I believe that sustainable energy is already proving how it will reinvigorate capitalism, put more people to work, and mitigate climate change all at once. You may believe that plans like the Green New Deal will result in unwanted “socialist” government control and the loss of jobs and profits in the fossil fuel sector.

 

You may believe that I am going to burn in eternal hell fire because I believe Jesus was a profound teacher, but don’t believe that I must believe in him to be “saved.” I believe that the Universe is in itself a dynamic, intelligent, unfolding process in which we humans are still trying to find our place, to figure out what it means to be mature and loving, and to learn to work together in harmony with each other and the system which produced us. I believe that all the great religions have more in common than not, first of all the Golden Rule.

 

Yes, such disagreements indicate a wide gap, even separate realities. But are they worth the agony and futility of a second Civil War? Are we wholly defined merely by our opinions? The great Sufic poet Rumi said: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Kate Johnson, a Buddhist teacher, writes: “The Buddha said that friendship is the whole of holy life. To accomplish it, we need only overcome our fear of reaching out to one another.”