Troubling trends on the path to peace

I want to relate my current take on the general flow of events.

There are revolutions in progress in at least half a dozen countries right now and my country along with a number of allies has begun another air and missile attack against a much smaller nation. Given what I understand as the circumstances I’m hard pressed to argue in favor of standing by and watching another dictator crush his own much weaker opposition. Egypt, meanwhile seems to be making some real progress with very little, so far, violence.

In this country and most of the west we face little threat of cruise missiles taking out whatever their directors choose. But we face a brutal financial reality where a few people control enormous wealth and use it to manipulate the general public and ongoingly change the rules of the game in their favor. They seem to be stepping up the trend of the rich getting richer while something like 90% of the population gets poorer. They pretty much control the media, with the possible exception of NPR and PBS. And, there is currently a powerful movement to cut off public funding of the only non-commercial media. I assume this is in particular because they do “too good” a job of reporting and exposing the greed that is consuming our society. And there still is some excellent reporting going on in the commercial media but it looks pretty fragile and vulnerable to me. The ratio of advertising to excellent reporting grows constantly. Advertising is included inside of most regular shows and seems to me to be creeping ever more into the best of the commercial news programs. And I rue the dearth of good news. What is going on where people are working together to create a better world?

Foster pointed today to a general trend of deterioration in the world he has created. I mentioned his two remarkable daughters Sierra and Annie. Butt he is pointing to something I see as well. The bad news seems to be constantly worse and more of it. Bombing Libya doesn’t seem to be moving in the direction of “no more violence on the part of humans on this planet" by the spring of 2012. That is now technically one year from now.

When I pull together what I see of my world and leave off my creation of it, it does look dire. I can note that it’s always darkest before the dawn but I have to fear that it will get much darker.

And, I believe that each of us and all of us collectively have more say in the matter than we might think. I think we can alter the whole path simply by each of us altering our own attitudes, perceptions and ways of being in the world. All of these are within our reach as individuals. We don’t really even need any help but, in this game, help is fun for everybody.

Love, Woody