We have a piece of calligraphy in our home done by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist teacher that says: “Peace in Oneself, Peace in the World”. This simple truth carries a second message unstated: “War in Oneself, War in the World. Our President has expressed this unstated truth in the war like nature of his comments this last weekend. Like a petulant child he has rebuffed even the Peace Prize winner, who tried to console him by gifting him the peace medal he didn’t win.  His warring nature suddenly wanted to  take Greenland from our ally Denmark. Idiocy has little to do with IQ intelligence.  Idiocy was originally meant to imply you couldn’t think beyond the borders and needs of your own city-state.  Here we have a dangerous situation of an extremely powerful man who appears to lack the capacity to think even beyond the borders of his own personal needs. He treats the task of peace making like a baseball card to be traded, bought or bartered

As Americans we have been humiliated by this behavior. Children who act with such petty acrimony need help. We would take our child aside and do our level best to help them grow to be good adults. You can’t do that with an adult who is isolated and extremely powerful.  We can only ask ourselves:  What did we, as a voting nation, miss when we selected this kind of immaturity to represent us on the world stage?  Our leader is supposed to represent all the history, power, and majesty of what was once the reputation of the American flag?  Our situation as a democratic culture as well as national culture could not be more serious.  Our American flags aren’t draped as much as they are drooped in these chaotic, harsh, days. 

An Urgent Suggestion for Good.

We cannot at this point with a Constitution built on the ideals of democracy and public authority nonviolently, change leadership.  Still, we can make it known decisively to our nation and the world that what we, the citizens of the USA, see on the world stage representing us today is not us as a majority.    We must show the world we intrinsically know peace is an authentic skill set, both in the secular and spiritual sense, and not some pathetic transaction of nickels and dimes wholly diminished in the scales of life and death, of universe and time.  In the presence of stronger personalities than his own, our president appears to have relented his rampage in Davos this week. The idea that owning or taking Greenland is the only path to security for the United States was revealed to the world as a ruse. We must do in our nation what the larger world is doing with this reckless administration; put up boundaries on speech and behavior modeling strength, peace, and health. That would be good.