How to have peace

How to Have Peace, Finally

1. End Envy. When everyone in society competes for money alone, envy and resentment run high and so does sleight of hand behavior. Let's stop the rat race. In a healthy culture, every job is important and given its place, and no one is left to rot at the bottom of the competitive heap except blatant incompetents.

2. Reduce pollution and urban blight. We're all scrabbling toward the top of the pile so we don't get left in a ghetto. But running away to the suburbs no longer protects us from deranged urban dwellers. A solution is to fix our cities and o put some people in jail for life if all they do is destroy things.

3. Kick our oil dependency. Oil is our heroin, our crack, our meth. We need a certain amount of it to run our economy. But do we really need individual cars, especially since they don't help us outrun the mess of the city? Do we really need all of these products? We can do just as well with less, and in fact be happier.

4. Support diversity. To have diversity, you need to have distinct ethnic groups. If you try to combine these groups, they'll fight for their own right to exist as a group and cause the ethnic warfare common to multicultural society. Let the ethnic groups separate and stop viewing such separation as a taboo "racism."

5. Don't try to hide different abilities. Billy is a genius, but Mary is a world-class athlete. We get embarrassed for both of these kids because they can't do something the other can. Let's end that charade. We're all different and we each have a place in the world. We don't need to be "equal" to be OK, and trying to force "equality" causes mayhem.

6. Allow people to live according to chosen values, even if they seem grotesque to us. In the west, our newspapers tell us that Muslims are primitive, women-abusing, tribal societies. But there is no science or philosophy that tells us reliability that such lifestyles are "bad." Tolerate difference.

7. Stop the war on drugs. Some people are gonna take 'em, and some are gonna drink to excess. Just keep them away from the kids and when they're observed screwing up on the job, fire them. We cannot afford the violence and police militarization of the war on drugs.

8. Forget the war between the sexes. If being equal means we gotta fight and have the 50% chance of divorce for every marriage we have, forget it. Let's respect each other for what we are and try to get along with more respect. "Equality" might be an illusory goal, since we've each got different equipment, inside and out, but respect and compassion are eternal.

9. Reverence. We're so busy chasing the holy dollar we've forgotten what it is to love life. Ancient monks in secluded monasteries saw intense concentration on tasks and appreciation of life as a form of prayer. Maybe this kind of soul stillness and inner beauty is missing in our lives, and we need to bring it back.

10. Open-mindedness. "Tolerance" implies not liking something, but putting up with it. Instead, we should try to understand that we each have different paths, and there is no ordained single route to glory. There are some things that are a good idea for everyone, but you have to do it for yourself. Be open-minded in the original meaning -- we know the goal, but there's more than one way to get there.

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Shayne