With much interest and emotion I watched the global oneness interview with you.
I was moved by it. Still there are some things I want to let you know:

All so called holy people did something for or against not so holy people. St.Martin gave half of his cloak to a beggar, Martin became a saint, the beggar did not.

Is it not so that the hero creates the heroic situation he wants to be a hero in?

If there had been no activists trying to prevent the cutting of the trees and those cutters would have been alone with their saws and the trees, perhaps one of them might have been in awe of the trees and of what he was doing and decide not to do this anymore. The presence of activists made the cutters just much mor determined to do the thing they did. Now it was not only cutting trees but going against activists as well.

Jesus let the murderers do what they did, he even healed the cut off ear of one of them. Could one say he respected them?

Those are questions I live with at the moment.

kind regards from Andy

All you can do is try to extend to them the unconditional love you desire. I know that can be difficult when they evoke such intense emotions.

Douglas

The other day my mother tried to dissuade me from my position in favor of same-sex marriage. Like so many others, she somehow believes that if a man is allowed to marry a man, or a woman is allowed to marry a woman, it somehow *nullifies* marriage between straight couples. My father died about a year-and-a-half ago, and he was married to my mother for 58 years, but the way my mom talks, you would think that her marriage would be tainted *retroactively* if gays ever get married in her state. She said that civil unions are just as good as marriage, but I of course argued that they are an inadequate substitute. Then I tried to make a distinction between “matrimony” (being wed “before God” in a church service) and “marriage” as a legal, secular concept, for which there is no constitutional basis that it must be between man and woman. She countered that argument by saying that her dictionary defined “marriage” as being between a man and a woman and I got out my own Webster’s and, sure enough, it did define “marriage” that way. (I’d like to have a word or two with Mr. Webster!) The argument ended with her calling me “ill-informed.” I assumed she was joking (she has said the opposite in the past), but I would have been really offended if I thought she was serious. Absurd, yet tragic, too. When people’s deepest fears are involved, they’ll always believe what they believe regardless of logic.

The other day I was at a peace demo in Times Square: only about a hundred or so people showed up. The weird thing is that all the polls show that a plurality of Americans agree with us now: America should get out of Afghanistan. People were going in and out of the subway or walking down the street, ignoring us, preoccupied with their holiday shopping or just going home, and I thought: how many of them are thinking, “I don’t have to speak out against the war, because Obama’s taking care of it”? The funny thing is, I marched against the future war in Afghanistan ten days after 9/11 and again in early October 2001, the day the bombs started falling, and though we saw hecklers and people who were totally baffled by us, some bystanders gave us the thumbs-up, too. Now there’s only indifference. And of course, the peace movement gets no credit for having been right all along. I’m not sorry I went to the event, but it was dispiriting.

I’d like to consider you part of my “framily” (although we’ve never met face to face) and I’m grateful to you for that word (which by the way isn’t in Webster’s) as well as the concept.

David Baldwin