Not everything in life is a deal.  When an offer is made and the only real alternative to the dealer’s offer is death and destruction of everything that matters to you, the transaction is called extortion. Extortion, for clarification, is a crime. Our country recently try to extort a deal with Iran and received the condemnation of pretty much the whole civilized world. Why?  Because when the president of a nation with full nuclear capacity threatens to annihilate a civilization, it is not an empty threat. Those words are an international assault.  The previous century has already determined all is not just in war.  The United States has had a criminal threat made in its name.  Time to decide what to do about that.

Who has that authority to discipline this man who commits crimes in our Nation’s name?  Only Congress and the cabinet have the authority to accomplish the appropriate effective response.  But the first contemplative pause is for the public individuals holding the authority to stop a president is for each of them to look into their individual sense of good and contemplate what it might actually mean to “end a civilization”. You, who can make the decisions to stop this assault; how would it feel to you personally to allow the ending of a civilization? To unpack the feeling state such an atrocity would evoke in you here are some personal exercises for you.  Go into your local grade school really look at a class of students and their teachers closely. How would it feel to you for you to end their existence?  Then go to the high school basketball game and carefully scan the cheering crowd, the young, hopeful basketball players, the moms and pops, aunts, uncles, Nanas and Grandpas .  How would it feel to you if you ended their existence in a fiery explosion? Now trot across town and walk into your hospital or pick your nursing home.  Would you be all right burying those vulnerable people in rubble?  Welcome to the reality of our threats to end another country and civilization.  If your personal sense of good is not impacted by contemplating those outcomes of  authentic war realities I really don’t have any more to say to you here. Put this reading down and take a walk.  If on the other hand these tragic possibilities cause you internal anguish you have completed the first step of a good decision which is the work of this project. 

Modest Proposal for Good

The Good Decision Project is called that for a reason. Ending a civilization would be a nearly incomprehensible crime starting with a horrific decision that must be countered with good decisions. Only a person with no imagination, no empathy or no direct experience of war as a soldier, or being a civilian victim of war could make such a threat as did our president. Those people who carry the authority of our democracy to discipline a president need now to make good decisions.  Civilians die in droves in all modern warfare. No matter how careful we try to be, schools get hit and hospitals fall. Civilians die. We need to deeply care about the losses on both sides of the conflict.  That would be good.  Yes, efforts are made to be precise and cautious in our military strikes, but never, until now, have we ever threatened wholesale death and destruction to a entire civilization as the single alternative to compliance to an order. Those words can’t be bought or brought back. We must over time try to once again bear our shame and re-earn the world’s trust of our country. That will be very difficult, but absolutely necessary and good. Get to work Congress and Cabinet.