I have a story to tell today.  But first, I have an unusual question for you.

What if there was a way to actually increase your influence when someone tells you you’re wrong!?

Opinions about who is right and who is wrong serve as the foundation for most verbal conflict specifically, and most of what’s difficult in relationships in general.  That’s why I often say that if you have to be right, you’re doing it wrong!

So here’s the idea.  The next time someone tells you you’re wrong, if you want to gain influence, the shortest and simplest course of action is to simply agree with them!   Say, “You’re right, I’m wrong.”  And then define how they are right in a way that serves your desired result.

For example, let’s say that I said something which, in spite of my good intentions, somehow offended you.  And, just as night follows day,  the result is that you accuse me of being offensive.  Experience of being in this very situation has taught me that the simplest thing to say is, ‘You’re right.  I’ve clearly offended you, and I apologize, because that wasn’t what I intended.”  The beauty of this approach is that you don’t have to agree with the accusation, or say something you don’t mean.  You simply meet people where they are, and acknowledge their perception to be right for them,  and apologize for them having their perception.  “Hey, I’m sorry.  That is not what I meant to have happen.”  And it’s over.

Unless you want to take it somewhere else.  Because just it can be helpful to clear your palette before tasting something new, an apology clears the relationship palette so people can hear something new.

Example:  The conference costume party

I was once asked at a big company sponsored conference costume party to announce the awards for best costume, worst costume, etc.  The V.P. of the company asked me to give an unannounced award for the ‘sexiest’ costume. (That might not have been the exact category, but I sure as heck don’t want to risk offending you by writing about the experience!)   I didn’t give this costume category much thought.  In what Robert Cialdini would call a ‘click-whirrrrr’ automatic response, I did what I was asked, and my first thought came after, when i thought that was the end of it.

Well guess what?  Someone at the event took offense at the prize and the category, and the next day, as the conference was ending and people were trading hugs and business cards, in that Kodak moment that happens at the end of a successful conference, I was cornered and accosted by that offended person.

She proceeded to call me every name in the book.  And I, of course, defended myself, because, hey, that wasn’t my intent.  She would have none of it.  My efforts to explain myself seemed to set her off more and more, until she was yelling at me and everyone was staring.  Her feelings of being offended transferred to me, because now I was deeply offended by her accusations.  Angrily, defiantly, I spit out the words, “I don’t care what you think!” and walked away.

Now, I’m sure you can tell that when a person says those words with anger, that they actually do care what the person thinks.  Otherwise, they wouldn’t feel so defensive.  And as I walked away, it slowly dawned on me that I had other choices besides defending, explaining and justifying my behavior.

The simple response would have been to say, “Wow, you’re right, clearly I offended you.  And I am deeply sorry.  That wasn’t my intent.”  It would have been over immediately.  And it would have ended the conflict in a way that she might be able to see me in a new way.  I might even have followed up with, “Can I tell you what happened?  It’s important to me that you know!”

Ok, I told you what happened, and what’s important for me to know from you is what you think about all this!  Your comments are welcome!

Be well,

Rick

Memorial Day approaches.  For many, Memorial Day is nothing but an extra day off from work, or a long weekend chance to get together with family and friends, laugh and chat over a hot barbeque and cold beer, and launch the summer season in style.   Considering how hard people work these days and how precious time off is, I totally get it.

Also, I’m no fan of war, but then, neither are most warriors.  I believe that war is what you do when you’ve run out of options.  I also know that this is Earth, and history is rife with just cause for self defense, and the best defense is often a good offense.   The sad fact is that war is sometimes necessary, and when it is,  when the call goes out to stand up and fight, those who answer the call do so, for the most part, because they want to do what is right.

So the true meaning of Memorial Day is somber and sobering.  The purpose of the holiday is to remember those men and women who, while serving our nation in the armed forces, made the ultimate sacrifice.  In this blog post, I’ll tell you some of the history of the day, and what you can do to make Memorial Day something more than just another holiday weekend.

A Little History

There are competing claims about the birthplace of Memorial Day. and it existed informally long before it became an official ‘holiday.’   It was born, no doubt, out of small gatherings to honor the war dead in cities and towns across the nation following the Civil War.  The first official proclamation came on May 5, 1868, when General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Repulic, issued his General Order No. 11,

“…gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with choicest flowers of springtime….let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us as sacred charges upon the Nation’s gratitude,–the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.” –General John Logan, General Order No. 11, 5 May 1868

Memorial Day was first observed on May 30 of that same year, when the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery were decorated with flowers.  Still, the nothern and southern states involved in the conflict were still at odds, and held their remembrances on different days.

World War 1 marked a turning point in the evolution of the day, when for the first time both southern and northern states remembered their fallen soldiers on the same day, making it about coming together and reconciling differences in honor of those who had given everything in service to the nation.

In 1915, John McCrae penned the poem, In Flanders Fields.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

The ritual wearing of red poppies on Memorial Day came about when Moina Michael, inspired by this poem, added these words:

We cherish too, the Poppy red

That grows on fields where valor led,

It seems to signal to the skies

That blood of heroes never dies.

Moina Michael had the idea to wear the red poppies now associated with the holiday, and to sell them in order to raise the money to contribute to servicemen and servicewomen in need.  This actually caught on in the world beyond our shores, thanks to a French visitor, Madam Guerin, who observing this, returned to her own country and began making artificial red flowers to raise funds for those orphaned and widowed by war.  In 1922, the VFW began selling poppies nationally.  A couple of years later, disabled veterans went to work making the artificial flowers for fund raising on Memorial Day.

What Changed?

Sadly, many Americans have no idea about the meaning of Memorial Day or its traditions.  Graves are ignored, forgotten and neglected.  Parades are few and far between.  And some folks just assume that it’s a day for remembering everyone who has died, and even in this, they fail to attend to the remembrance.   This is, I gather, a response to an act of Congress, in 1971, when Memorial Day was folded into a three day weekend in the National Holiday Act.

In December of 2000, a resolution for a National Moment of Remembrance was passed by Congress to help remind Americans of the true meaning of Memorial Day. At 3 p.m. local time,  all Americans are called upon

“To voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a Moment of remembrance and respect, pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to ‘Taps.”

How our world has changed.  Now, just asking for a moment, instead of a day, is considered significant.  But it is a step in the right direction.   After all, for the sacrifice that was made, ought we not be at least a moment’s worth of grateful?

I remember classmates who died in Vietnam.  Family who died in the two world wars and Korea.  Neighbors and children of my neighbors who will never return from the middle east.   Though you and I may take issue with the faults and failings of our government, with the willingness of those who have never served to sacrifice those who willingly did serve, still, I have no issue with those who answer the call, who stand and serve, who risk it all so that you and I may live in freedom.   In these brave souls, we have much to be grateful for.  Memorial Day reminds us to stand together in memory and gratitude, and in this way binds us all together in both love and loss.

What You Can Do

You can visit a cemetery and place flags or flowers on the graves of the fallen

You can fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until noon

You can give some support to orphans, widows and widowers of the dead.

• http://www.taps.org/
• http://www.fallenheroesmemorial.com/links.html
• http://www.herobracelets.org/

And you can participate, at 3pm local time, in a moment of remembrance and gratitude.

You can listen to an mp3 of TAPS by clicking here.

Lastly, may I recommend a wonderful Memorial Day blog memorial, put together by my friend Steve Kayser.  It moved me, and I believe it will move you deeply too.

Be safe, be well, be grateful.  On this very day, our men and women in uniform are risking, and all too often laying down, their lives for you.  Take time to notice. Take time to give thanks.  Take time to remember.  I’ll not be posting on Monday, the 31st, but will be back for my regular post a week later.

Rick

Has Apple used hyperbole to describe their iPad?  I couldn’t wait to get one and find out for myself where the reality of it is.  And now that I’ve got my 3G iPad up and running, I confess that I’m smitten yet again by another amazing product from Apple Inc.   Apple says it’s magical, and IMHO,  that’s not hyperbole, it really feels that way.

It’s simply beautiful in its design.  You can set the wallpaper so you have a different startup image and desktop images.  And, when you go to unlock, there’s a slideshow button right there that will instantly turn the iPad into a living picture frame for whatever you direct it to.   Yesterday, as I was working on my laptop,  I hadan app called ‘Pocket Pond’ running on the iPad nearby on my desk.  The look and sound of it is peace-inducing – I hear the sound of an outdoor water feature, fish swimming about, and if I touch the pond, it responds.  This simple little app seems to help me think, write and develop my ideas when I run it side by side with my office Macs. I’m really excited about the impact this device is going to have on my creative output.

iPad, how do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

The iPad is somehow familiar in its look and feel.  It has that Mac like quality of ‘friendliness’ that you would expect from an Apple product in its every detail.  It starts immediately. Everything happens immediately.  And I mean immediately, not a moment of delay.  Wake it from sleep and everything is just how you left it.

It’s got great built-in speakers, so I’ve been using it to access my iTunes music in my office, in the bedroom, and when I’m working out.   It’s got a beautiful bright screen, so watching movies and TV shows and YouTube videos is pure pleasure, and some apps (like Awaken, which I use as a hotel room alarm clock) lets you turn down the brightness with a swipe of your fingers.

The size of it makes it something I can use in the hammock, or walking around the office and house.  Now, this is a portable computing device!  Without the case, it felt heavier and a bit awkward in the hands, and I was concerned about scratching it up.  The rubber case provided by Apple gives it a bit of a Batman-like appearance, and with the case on, it feels exactly right.

I spent a few hours exploring the iTunes App Store, looking for goodies that could help me extract more goodness from this device.  And I found a treasure trove, with something worth getting in every category. There’s an app called AppDeals for the iPad that helped me find some real bargains in iPad software.  Almost all the apps in the store are fairly inexpensive and, for the most part, dazzling in their graphics and simplicity of operation.

So far, nothing I’ve tried has crashed, and even old iPhone apps, designed for the smaller screen, run just fine.  When you load an iPhone app that hasn’t been developed for the iPad, it appears in the center of your screen at the same size and resolution it has on the iPhone screen.  The result is that the text can be a bit pixelated when blown up to 2x in order to fill the screen, something easily done by hitting the 2x button that appears near the framed iPhone app.

I’ve yet to run out of power, and I’ve had it on for about 12 hours.  Currently, I show 25% remaining.  And I’ve really pushed it.

I keep stopping to say wow.   Here is a computer I can hold in one hand, that has enough power to serve my needs all day, even when I’m traveling, and that does almost everything I do on a laptop as well or better. Most typing I do is in small spurts, and the built in on-screen keyboard isn’t hard to master.  For larger typing jobs, like writing this blog post for example, I use the dock and keyboard I got for it.

Reading the news on it is a pleasure, much better than messing with a newspaper while trying to eat a meal at the table.  I’m using apps like ‘fwix’ for local news, and  the excellent ‘Reuters News Pro’ for everything else. USA Today has done a great job on their app as well, though it appears they were rushing it out the door as it isn’t quite finished.  Digg has a great app, Discovery too, and MacDailyNews (one of my daily habits for a long time now) is more fun than ever in this context.  And ‘sobees for FB’ turns Facebook into a newspaper format that is simply awesome.

I’ve played around with Keynote and Pages on my iPad, and I’m impressed.  Admittedly, the iPad versions don’t do everything that the Mac versions do.  There are serious font limitations, Keynote doesn’t do ‘actions’ and doesn’t recognize ‘actions’ from imported Keynote presentations.  There is no notes field visible on the iPad when running a presentation onscreen, nor any way to see what’s coming next, and these features are big differentiators from the inferior-in-every-conceivable-way PowerPoint.  But I’m guessing Apple will add these great features of the Mac version back in when they update the app.  And the basic need of running a presentation from Keynote on iPad works flawlessly once you’ve taken these things into account.

Designing a flyer in Pages is a pure pleasure, as the human interface just makes complete sense.  I’m also using Simplenote for, well, simple note-taking, something I can now do anywhere I want, whether I’m watching the history channel and googling interesting bits while I watch, or to prepare a quick summary of points I want to remember to make when speaking to a client or an audience.

I’m using PrintCentral to send docs to my printer, and GoodReader to read PDF and word documents I’ve imported wirelessly onto the iPad. Bringing in the documents was incredibly easy to do, and worked seamlessly.   At long last, all those PDF ebooks I’ve collected the last few years but never had the patience to read while sitting at my desk have become interesting and useful!

My reference library is growing too.  I’ve got This Day running, which, as you might imagine, offers something that happened this day.  I’ve got GoSkyWatchPlanetarium, which I took outside and got to see what the stars I’ve been looking at are called.   I’m also running NaturalCures, an iPhone app that works just fine on the iPad, though I’d like to see it developed for this larger format.  I’ve got Epocrates to answer any clinical questions I have, and it’s a no brainer to see how this device is going to figure in to healthcare…a doctor or nurse can have a complete patient record in their hands along with a medical reference library, on demand.  I’ve got the entire White Pages (phonebook), and a First Aid app for emergencies.  And my GPS apps work great too.  In particular, Magellan RoadMate looks and acts so much better on the iPad than it did on my iPhone.

I’ve tried Webex, the meeting app, and it’s WAY cooler for online meetings than using my laptop or desktop. Skype works great, as does TruePhone, for making calls across the internets to anywhere in the world.  I’ve got an app called QuickVoice that will record a message and then convert it to text and email it (with uncanny accuracy!)   Dragon Dictation still works pretty well, but makes quite a few errors.   Dragon Search fares much better.  I rarely type in a search anymore, just let Dragon hear my needs and fetch for me.   The built in Calendar app is gorgeous, as is the Address Book,  and as these are all integrated with the other Apple apps running on the iPad, scheduling and working with my clients is as easy as can be.

Business is a great context for the iPad, but the personal side of it is terrific too.  The iPad seems made for comic books.  In fact reading a comic book on the iPad gave me the same pleasure that I experienced when reading the 12cent titles of my childhood.  I think comicbook lovers are going to flip over the iPad because of this superior (and more immersive somehow) experience.   I’ve tried several comic book readers.  The Star Trek reader offers access to a library made up exclusively of Star Trek titles, some of which are free and all of which look fantastic.  Marvel’s app does similarly well with the entire Marvel catalog.  Not sure why, but DC seems to be slow in coming to the platform, ironic that, since Flash and the ever speedy Superman are both DC titles.  I grew up reading comic books, and have kept my love for this medium alive over the years (celebrating Superman Thursday, for example!)

The ABC player works flawlessly, as does Joost, YouTube, Yahoo! Entertainment.   On the other hand, TV.com looks awful, and iTV isn’t ready for the iPad.  All the radio apps work just great, and listening to radio on the iPad brings back memories of transistor radios from my youth.

New apps are coming out every day now. While there’s room for improvement, it’s already amazing, and the next generation of this device will be more amazing still.    A week ago, I was in New York, and visited the Apple Store on 5th Avenue at midnight.  It was packed, with lines of people waiting to get their hands on an iPad.  Three days ago in Austin, another Apple Store, and the same experience.  Two weeks ago in Cincinnati and Toronto, the same thing.  Apple’s produced another stunning success.

Right now, all the other hardware companies are playing catch up, trying to come up with something like the iPad, just like they did with the iPhone. But while everyone else is scrambling to catch up, Apple is already hard at work on the next step. I have no idea the depth of their playbook, but I’m guessing Steve is several steps ahead of the whole industry for the forseeable future.

Have you played with the iPad?  What do you think?  What are your favorite apps so far?  What do you wish would come out for the iPad next?   Your comments and feedback are welcome!

be well

Rick

In this final post of my blog series about getting beyond Us/Them thinking, I’d like to talk about the part we each play in what happens to all of us.

The world is my country.  All mankind are my brethren.  To do good is my religion.
- Thomas Paine

I love that quote.  That’s from ‘the’ Thomas Paine, author of the Common Sense pamphlet that inspired the American Revolutionaries.  And from the quote it seems obvious that his idea was to serve the whole of us, that this was his founding ideal, his big idea, and he was just looking for a place to get the party started.  It’s provides a very different lens than the way many of us think of U.S.

Because I can see my commonality with my fellow human beings, I like to think of myself as, and behave like, a peace maker.  I enjoy resolving conflict, whether it’s between a parent and child, spouses, business partners or team-mates, or a city council that has lost its way.  In fact, a friend recently suggested that I write a letter to the editor of my local paper about what I would do with congress if they invited me to help them resolve their conflict.  And I think I could do it!  I’d likely apply a similar approach to what I did with the Ashland City Council, focusing first on attitude, then behavior, then organization.  But when it comes to peace between nations, cultures and religions, this business of working for peace is a sticky situation.

It is the nature of stress that if you perceive a threat, then you must resist it until you are exhausted. And I perceive some real threats, threats that I take very personally because they are threats to my loved ones, on the planetary level.  Start with terror organizations and nuclear armed rogue nations.   Add in the corporations that have no moral or ethical center, raping and pillaging the future to feather their nests in the present.  Sprinkle generously with too many chemicals to count filling our air, soil and water.  Don’t forget the clear-cutting and overfishing, or the island of plastic that floats around the world strangling the life out of the ocean wherever it goes.  Now, to keep it interesting, toss in some money grubbing politicians and gun-for-hire lobbyists whose work it is to keep change from happening or to make things worse in order to make things better for their soul-less clients.  And let’s not forget that stressed out people can go crazy, and there are lots of stressed out people ready to pick up a gun or climb out on a ledge, and the number is growing daily.

At the same time that I contemplate all the potential threats, I know that fighting or withdrawing from a threat may strengthen it.  It seems t0 me a basic rule in life is at work here.

What you resist, persists.  Said another way, if all you know is what you don’t want, you will get more of it.

Our brains are organized this way. It’s your reticular activating system, and it’s scanning the billions of bits of sensory data bombarding your nervous system looking for relevance to what you care about. If all you can do is identify what you don’t want, your brain thinks that’s what you care most about. So if you tell your brain what you don’t want , it will immediately set to work finding evidence of it. Tell your child what you don’t want him or her to do, and it becomes an invitation for it.  Fighting and withdrawing from a perceived threat only works until you’re exhausted, at which point that threat, if it’s real, overruns and overcomes you.

The only value in perceiving a threat, as far as I can tell, is recognizing it as a call to action. Not the action of mere resistance (though sometimes, like in the Civil Rights movement and Women’s Suffrage movement in the US, the Green Revolution of Iran, or Tianemann Square in China, resistance is a painful yet necessary first step to draw attention to your plight), but of taking aim at a different outcome than the one threatening to happen.   It’s that basic question:  If you don’t want ‘that’, what do you want?   What makes it so hard to answer is that we are too easily blinded by our fears and our answer is usually the first thing we can think of to minimize the fear, or make the fear stop, or make the threat go away.

But identifying a real outcome is essential, because it is the way out of stress, away from exhaustion and death.   Vague generalizations won’t do, either. You have to be specific.  What do you mean when you say you want ‘that’?   And if you’re going to move towards that, what will you do with the habitual behaviors that worked so well to protect you in the past?  How are you going to change what you’re doing in the present in order to get that different outcome in the future?

Since the only corner of the universe I can be sure of improving is myself, primarily because I have no control over anything outside of myself, it’s my choice to make about the part I will play and how I will play it.   I choose to use my short season upon this Earth to better myself, and then put my personal improvement to work for the betterment of the world around me.  I have no guarantees that my desired outcomes will ever come to pass, but I can guarantee my own persistence and determination to do all I can for as long as I can.

And really, just doing my part is enough for me.  I’m doing what I can do.  Who knows? Maybe I’ll inspire you by my example.  Maybe I’ll enroll you through my persuasive communication.  Maybe you and I can pool our resources and share the burdens of our efforts too, on occasion.  But it’s down to me.  That’s where the difference lives.  If humanity is an experiment in the universe’s laboratory, the experiment is running on free will, and that means that it’s up to each of us.  We can choose to work for success, but there’s no guarantee, because how the rest of you play with me determines to a great degree what I can be.  We’re all connected. We almost all of us have a stake in the future.

There is a place where neither us nor them has any real relevance. That’s when the desired state is initiative. Groups can’t take initiative. Only individuals can. It’s one of the things we all have in common.  So I’m taking the initiative.  I’m choosing to work for a future worth living in. I hope you are too.  Because if we’re going to come together, we’ve got to get over ourselves, get past our prejudice, projections, and limiting assumptions. If we approach everything as a potential threat, we’ll be too exhausted to think straight. Better to accept the unacceptable, identify a clear connection, find common ground and build on it, and take small steps forward.  I do my part, you do your part, then we together can play an ever bigger part.

Here’s the alter call.  I encourage you, urge you, and our descendants are begging you, please do your part. Disrupt dysfunctional patterns in yourself. Make some new distinctions so that you can notice that when people have a different view than your own, they have it for a reason they consider a good one.  Notice something you hadn’t noticed before. Understand something in a new way. Recognize that fear is as irrational as it is necessary, and perhaps wisdom is learning the difference  about when to act on it versus when to act in spite of it.

This concludes my series on ‘Moving Beyond Us/Them Thinking.’  But I’ll be back next week with a post on another topic related to persuasive communication and life skills.  Until then, your comments and feedback are always welcome.

Be well,

Rick

Picking up from last week’s post, this time I’ll tell you where I think we all can find common ground.  It’s all around us, and it’s staring us in the face, right here, right now.  We see it most clearly when we face the future.

The common ground of the present moment is the only thing certain in life.  You can’t count on the past for this, because the past keeps changing depending on who is writing the history.   (The Texas School Board has been hard at work on that!)

And the future is a big unknown, a giant question mark.  While we can have some success at making the invisible visible by charting trends and collecting data through time, at best we can make predictions, and our best predictions either overstate or underestimate the case.   The future is even a giant question mark for those who claim to have religious or spiritual certainty, because the deeper meaning of their belief will only be revealed in a coming time of revelation.

But here’s the thing.  If there’s going to be a future worth living in, I think you will find more than enough agreement from most everybody that much needs to change. That’s a promising field of opportunity. It means that connection, communication and persuasion have the mojo, leverage and potential to win the day.

So many years ago, John Lennon invited us to ‘Come together.’ And though some of the world has come together in some specific ways (notably in economics and sports), generally, it has yet to happen.   Yet we also know that war, as a way of settling differences, is becoming increasingly obsolete. That’s because our weapons for waging it against them can also kill us. I do not doubt that many people hope for, wish for, pray for and dream of finding a better and more peaceful way to resolve our differences in this world. What’s stopping us?  What is standing in the way of our coming together?

We are.  Us. Centuries of history, of mistrust and misunderstanding, of ignorance in both our leaders and our role models, have got us to where we are. And much of the world still believes in the necessity of war. Many of us, and by us I mean the human race, hear the word peace and it provokes nothing but fear and terror.  History shows that there are those who use periods of peace to buy time to build up their ability to wage war.  There are those whose definition of peace is to take another piece of us.  In a world where Hitlers and Stalins and Bin Ladens rise up in every generation and, pitting us against them,  dish out the destruction until they themselves are destroyed, it’s a wonder that we get along at all.  Every group and subgroup of us has some foundation for grudges and grievances.  Everyone has a sad tale to tell of being victimized by someone else. Human history is not a happy tale of challenge and triumph.  Much of it is the story of horrible suffering and pain, torture and torment, and with each retelling of that story, new generations adopt old nightmares and terror.

Look up and look around.  It’s not just history, but geology, archeology, and astronomy too.  We know deep down in our soul that, no matter how much we hope and pray it were otherwise, the universe is not benevolent.  It Generates, Operates and Destroys.   We don’t want to expose ourselves and our families to danger, to turn our back only to find moments later that someone has plunged a knife into it.   And so protecting ourselves from each other has become a planetary prime directive that keeps us apart, keeps us afraid, and keeps us angry.

Yet at the same time, I believe it is obvious to just about any thinking person that addressing the urgency of our fears while ignoring the greater importance of the future cannot go on forever.  Something’s got to give.  While we can’t afford to forget, (those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them) we must find it in ourselves to forgive, to go first, to give the benefit of the doubt, to give peace a chance.

One of my personal heroes, Bucky Fuller, spoke of humanity eventually arriving at the end of the womb of acceptable ignorance, a time when we would be faced with a stark choice.  Continue backing into the future by fighting or fleeing from what we don’t want, or turning to face it squarely, realize we will live in the tomorrow we create today, and get busy creating a tomorrow we want to live in. He called it Earthian’s critical moment, and saw it as a pass/fail test as the universe inexorably proves its own integrity. Events like the meltdown at Chernobyl, the events of 9/11, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions have convinced me that we’ve arrived, that this is that moment, that pivotal moment, in which we begin changing the course of human history and bending it towards peace and justice, towards sustainability and general health, or we will face our doom, not at the hand of God, but by our own hand.

I’ll be back in my next post to talk about what can be done and who can do it.  Until then, your comments and feedback are welcome.

Be well,
Rick