It’s late night here in London. I had some thoughts I felt like sharing so I jumped on Substack live.

Sending love to all…

M.

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And such eruptions will continue to occur in this society until we decide to become non-violent. Violence is a symptom, it is not a cause.

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Health is not the absence of sickness; sickness is the absence of health. Health is something we must proactively cultivate. Similarly, peace is not the absence of violence; violence is the absence of peace. Peace is something we must proactively cultivate.

Yet America’s obsession with brute force is evidenced everywhere - from our foreign policy to our environmental policies to our law enforcement policies. Until we seek to remove it everywhere, it will always plague us somewhere…

In the meantime, a group of elites being possibly endangered but no one shot at gets the ruling class of this country more apoplectic than American school children being shot and killed at point blank range. Our views are very, very skewed on this topic. And only we can change that.

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According to Heather Cox Richardson today, there’s a “newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.”

So it’s no longer just the usual suspects of defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), General Dynamics, Boeing — making money on this war. They will of course make fortunes replenishing the supply that we’re exhausting in Iran, repairing what’s been broken, etc. But now the government itself — i.e. the cabal that’s currently running this country — will themselves have an equity stake in the madness. Don Jr. and Eric have also gotten in on the business opportunity, selling drone interceptors to Gulf countries being hit by Iran.

Trump is a businessman, as we all know, and there’s no bigger business opportunity than the U.S. war machine. His “dream military” after all has a yearly budget of $1.5T. In the old days all this would have been called war profiteering - which is illegal of course - but those days are over.

Registered to vote yet?

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I remember years ago when people started saying the government should be run like a business. First of all, no it should not; it should be run like a healthy family. And secondly, what kind of business? A righteous one, or an immoral unfettered con? Makes a difference.

Of course, the government should be spending American taxpayer money in legal, ethical and appropriate ways. It’s probably a good thing at this point to remember that no major part of the U.S. Defense Department has ever passed an audit. But hey, let’s give them half a trillion dollars more, shall we? One of the more ridiculous claims of this administration is that it’s going after fraud, when in fact the President himself has been convicted of numerous counts of fraud and is pardoning fraudsters at an alarming rate. And secondly, this administration is a fraud. Most importantly, it has fraudulently claimed to serve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. From violating the separation of powers to impounding appropriated funds to attacking the press to withholding citizens’ due process to prosecuting illegal war and more — instead of protecting the Constitution, it is ripping it up.

The corruption in American politics has gone from a contained cancer, which it has been for years, to a full body diseased condition. Watching virtuous Congresspeople, Democrat as well as Republican, trying yet failing to withstand the current assault on every pillar of freedom our government is supposed to represent, has put millions of us in a state of shock. After the shock comes outrage. After the outrage comes something almost eerily calm. “Okay, it’s happening. Now what do we have to do?”

And that’s where things get tricky. Obviously we need to wrest as much control from this administration as possible with our votes in November, but it will take more than that to address the deeper elements of what’s gone wrong in this country. As we’re all aware, Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. He’s merely the tip of a spear and unless we deal with that, then just removing the tip wouldn’t matter all that much in the long run. Our Supreme Court and both houses of Congress are now split into two categories: the kneecapped, and the complicit. Either way, they cannot now be counted on to protect us.

As I’ve been saying for a while, it’s our turn now. We the People need to stand up and keep standing. We can take upon ourselves a four-pronged, integrative approach to the struggle at hand.

1. Understand the larger arc of history that’s taken us to this point. Just today, I saw this comment on my YouTube page:

I am currently reading her book The Healing of America. I realize that if I’d read it when it was first published in 1997, I would have dismissed it as alarmist. Now I know that I was living in lala land and unable to see the true direction that the country was headed. How unfortunate that so many others were like me then.

I replied to her that soon I will be hosting a book study on my book HEALING THE SOUL OF AMERICA. You might want to purchase it, or check it out of your local library, so can read it before we do the class. We’ll provide details after next week’s online Town Hall.

2. Prepare your internal self for the work at hand. As Gandhi taught in his lessons on political non-violence, “self-purification must precede political action.” What’s happening today is an attack not only on our institutions but also on our nervous systems, and cultivating our personal capacity to endure this moment is necessary if we’re to transform it. Whether you’re doing the daily meditations here on Substack, or doing any other spiritual, reflective, or meditative practice, the work to strengthen our attitudinal muscles is as important as any other form of political activity. Only a whole-person, holistic, integrative approach to this moment will be powerful enough for democracy to prevail. Among other things, spiritual practice will increase your intuitive ability to discern the part that you can best play in the unfolding process of our political repair. When Gandhi was asked to name the leader of the Indian Independence movement, he responded, “the small still voice within.”

3. Involve yourself now in the coming elections. The obvious political work is right in front of us, as every American can vote for a member of the House of Representatives this November, and a third of us can vote for a Senator. Remember this from Abraham Lincoln: “While the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years.”

   With enough work, we can win back both houses of Congress. We need to remember that the President and his minions are already at work trying to rig this election, and only a massive showing at the polls will be able to override their efforts. Above all, make sure you’re registered. Do it now!!

4. Stay informed. Information is power. After meditating each day, I scan Heather Cox Richardson and other sources as well in order to stay on top of the news. It’s important not to ignore what’s happening, but equally important not to allow ourselves to spiral down emotionally. If you’ve watched two or three ICE videos, you don’t need to watch ten more. We all know what’s happening, and each of us is only asked to do the part that we ourselves feel called to do to respond effectively to these times. None of us are alone in this. We are part of a matrix of healing, organized on an invisible plane by nature itself. Think of yourself as one cell in the immune system now rushing in to heal our body politic. None of us can afford to sit out our part in this, but it’s the entirety of the system that accomplishes the task.

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If on any day it all just seems too much, that’s okay too. Binge watch Downton Abbey or something. But then come back. Friends don’t let friends sit out this moment.

One more thing. Late in his life, my father had a weak heart. We were told by doctors that because he’d been so in shape earlier in his life, particularly as a soldier in WW2, his body had formed a kind of alternative set of capillaries then compensating for the system that was otherwise damaged. And that’s what we’re doing now. We’re forming an alternative field of possibilities that will compensate for those now being blocked. Whatever would be the opposite of a shadow government, we’re it.

Get on it.

Hi everyone -

We process with friends and therapists, but we don’t process collectively in this country. Yet what we’re going through is a collective trauma. I see our Town Halls as an opportunity to process what’s going on with others who are going through it too.

Our next Town Hall for paid subscribers will be on Monday, April 27th, at 1pm PT / 4pm ET. I very much look forward to this opportunity to gather with members of our Transform community.

When I was a little girl living in Houston, a hurricane named Carla hit Galveston. I remember my parents boarding up all the windows in our house, explaining to my brother and sister and me that a big storm was coming, it might be kind of scary for a while, but to always remember: Storms end. I know it seems like we’re in the middle of a storm right now, but let’s remember: Storms end. I see a lot of opportunity for something new and better on the other side of it.

I hope you’ll join me on April 27th for a conversation about the meaning of this storm we’re in now. What does it says about who we’ve been, and what does it say about who we need to be now?

The link is below for paid subscribers.

I look forward to seeing you there.

All my best,
Marianne

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For the defenders of democracy, the first order of business is to win control of Congress back from the cult-like Trumpsters who now preside there. Then of course, to win the Presidency in 2028.

But neither of those alone will be enough to heal the cancer that’s now deep in the bones of our democracy. We have broken our most basic social contract: the idea that government should secure our unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We have become a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, leaving us with too many Americans for whom America is simply too expensive a place to live, a planet imploding under the weight of our irresponsible environmental policies, and militarism the dominant factor in our foreign policy.

Enough is enough. We need to rethink, repair, and regenerate what is good, true, and beautiful about our country and the world.

Conscious citizenship means more than that you have a passport. It means you have an emotional investment in the well-being of your country. You understand the responsibilities that come with power, you understand the gravity of the mistakes that we have made, you understand the depth of the problems we face, and you are dedicated to being part of the solution.

All of us are responsible now for all of the above. We need to see citizenship itself as a layer of any meaningful, well-lived life. We need a movement of Americans now ready to think, feel and act our way into a new America. Out of this period of chaos can emerge a new beginning, but only if we are willing to make it so.

Let’s goooo!

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Thanks to Maddie Hale for having me on this week’s Trump Report.

And don’t forget to join me for a Town Hall for paid subscribers on Monday, April 27. You can find the login info here.

Early this year, President Trump told Iranians to keep taking to the streets … that “help is on the way.” And many believed him at the cost of their lives. Shortly after the war started, U.S. officials admitted that “regime change is not achievable” - a fact that had been made clear to U.S. Presidents by our military intelligence for years. It was never possible to bomb away the IRGC.

Trump’s promise was just another bogus social media post. And who knows, maybe he believed it was true at the time. He seems to have gotten to the point where even he doesn’t know when he’s lying and when he’s telling the truth. Something that stood out in the movie The Apprentice, about Trump’s relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn, is the idea that the only truth is what you say it is. There are no objective facts, and if there are then they don’t matter. Trump is known to have told quite a few people over the years that if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe it.

The problem is, the American presidency is not a TV reality show. Life in Iran is not a set that breaks down for lunch. The utterances of a U.S. President can mean life or death to people around the world, and from shutting down the USAID to life in Iran, people have died and are dying as a consequence of Trump’s words and wishes. This is true of all presidents, by the way, but before this even the worst Presidential decisions - Bush invading Iraq, even Eisenhower okaying the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran - were made by people who in their own way, however mistaken, thought they were doing the right thing for the world. When has Trump ever made a decision based on his idea of “doing the right thing” for anyone but himself, his family, or his cronies? That is not the way his mind works.

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The President now says that the war in Iran has been a victory for the United States, with Hegseth declaring “we’ve achieved our military objectives.” What a political mindfuck. For if after us achieving those military objectives Iran is still on track to build a nuclear weapon, the IRGC is still in power, and they’re opening and closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, then we have not only not achieved anything…we have actually walked backwards. Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, while by no means perfect, now looks like a stroke of genius.

President Trump has clearly grown bored with this war (every little boy grows tired of his toy soldiers after a while), preferring instead to attack the Pope and create memes of himself as Jesus. He says we have achieved regime change, having killed the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the beginning of the war. Khamenei has been replaced however by his son Mojtaba Khamenei, whose wife and at least one of his sons were killed in the same strike that killed his father. So is anyone under the impression he’ll be nicer? Clearly not. The regime change we have achieved is to leaders even meaner, more furious, and now ramping up its public executions of some of Iran’s most brilliant and creative citizens. If what they were doing before was horrific, what they’re doing now is apparently even more atrocious. Pete Hegseth is obsessed with the word “lethality” and the Iranian leadership seems bent on showing him what that means.

Look at any news site in the United States, those leaning left or those leaning right, and you’ll see that the vast majority of Iran coverage is concerned with the international movement of oil or any increase in American gas prices. You will see very little about the suffering of the Iranian people, which if anything is likely to increase now. We should never have gone into this war unless we knew for sure that we could free them, and every President has known that unless we were willing to put boots on the ground then we couldn’t. No American President has been in a position to do that, which is why no President before this one has. This war was a pre-ordained failure.

As things stand now, there’s a very good chance we’ve only made things worse…for the Iranians, and even ultimately for us. No matter what the President does now - no matter how he finds a way to wash his hands of this mess he created - the people of Iran will be punished for his false promises. Much like in Afghanistan, people believed us… they trusted us…and in the end we betrayed them with barely a, “Yeah, that’s sad but we tried.”

The Iranian people will pay for this for years, and so will we. World opinion is done with us now. A superpower has become a laughing stock, and that is a world-shattering shift. People knew we were hypocritical at times, but never before has the world’s perception been that America is a weak and baldfaced liar. It will take years to undo that perception, and our children will pay for it greatly. All because we put a veritable child in the White House.

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Years ago, I was locked in a court battle with an ex-literary agent who had stolen the royalties from my first three books. It became a complicated case because the agent died during the proceedings, and there were questions about paying me back. I can’t remember a lot of the details but one thing I do remember is this: at a certain point a judge ruled in my favor and issued a court order directing that I be paid. Previously bickering lawyers put down their swords at that point, as once a judge issued a court order that was it. Case closed.

That’s why I’m gobsmacked these days every time the Trump administration ignores a court order. Us regular folks don’t get to do that. On a movie set, the director gets to call “Cut.” In a healthy family, a parent gets to say “No.” And in a court case, a judge’s ruling is meant to have some modicum of finality.

Not to Trump and his cohorts, however. And that’s how you know we’re in trouble. He not only ignores the law, but has others in his administration do so as well. A judge says, “Turn that plane around;” they simply don’t. A judge says detainees at “Alligator Alcatraz” have a right to use phones and access their lawyers; the guards cut off access to the phones, then beat and pepper spray the detainees. Congress allocates money as the Constitution gives them the authority to do; OMB Director Russ Vought impounds whatever funds he feels aren’t “consistent with our agenda.”

Vought is a perfect example of the problem we have on our hands these days. He is a Christian nationalist with no respect for religious pluralism or ethnic diversity. He is one of the main authors of Project 2025, which is a veritable blueprint for a basic dismantling of our democratic freedoms. He is one of many, in and out of government, who have no problem with Trump as king, dictator, or whatever else you want to call someone leading a charge against the Constitution.

Oh come on, Marianne. Isn’t it a bit hyperbolic to say that? Um, no. Not only are they doing it, but they know they’re doing it, and they think that what they’re doing is a good idea. Democracy is not convenient to their purposes.

When during his swearing-in for a second term President Trump took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, he did not put his hand on the Bible. As they say these days, the body doesn’t lie.

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On any given day, the news is filled with more ways in which our world has been turned upside down. It’s not so much anymore that we can’t believe what’s happening. We get that it’s happening, but we’re shocked by how ineffective they have rendered any genuine opposition. Turning on the news, there’s hardly an piece that doesn’t describe the President’s antics. He does something nuts, so someone reports it. He does something else nuts, and someone reports that too. He does something possibly even more nuts, and another someone reports that as well. The only break in the action seems to come from Congresspeople with no control of either House or Senate, yelling, “He can’t do that! He can’t do that!” But yes he can. He has done an extraordinary job of purging the government of people and positions that might hold him to account.

We’re checkmated at this point, and there’s a generalized depression in the air because we see that. Obviously the “we” here doesn’t include his fans, some of whom still tell me, “Take him seriously, but don’t take him literally,” as though everything’s fine and I should just calm down. They are the ones with the Trump Derangement Syndrome, by the way. We might be hysterical, furious, and depressed, but we’re not deranged. He is doing what he’s doing and we can see it.

On the material plane, we all know what it is we have to do. We have to win the midterms, and we have to win them big. We can be encouraged by Hungary’s example, where authoritarian strongman Viktor Orban - one of Trump’s role models - was finally defeated after sixteen years of steadily increasing dictatorial power. Orban did everything he could to rig that election, and still he was defeated by millions of Hungarians who had simply had enough.

Such rigging is happening here as well, of course. From suggesting the U.S. shouldn’t even have an election to suggesting that elections should be federalized, Trump is already waging war against the midterms. He knows there’s a good chance Democrats could sweep both houses of Congress, and he and his allies are working hard to sabotage such a possibility. He’s laying the groundwork for claims of a rigged election already, even though he’s the one doing the rigging. He is focused on an anti-voting bill called the SAVE Act, which would require strict voter identification and proof of citizenship to register. While that doesn’t sound so sinister, the way it’s worded would create an administrative burden for married women who changed their name when they got married. While our government should be doing everything it can to make voting easier, it’s doing everything it can to make it harder.

So that’s where you and I come in. These are not normal times, and we shouldn’t expect the voter registration process to be the same as in past years. In many cases there could be weird requirements, barriers, delays, or hassles intended to be so frustrating that we’ll just give up. Yet we must not. We should all get registered now, dotting every i and crossing every t just to make double, triple sure that our vote will be counted. It doesn’t matter where you live or whether or not you think your vote would even matter. Anything can happen this year. There needs to be a rush on the polls in 2026 that is nothing short of historic. If Hungarians could push back Orban, we can push back Trump.

And there’s more to the story than just that. The Dalai Lama said that “in order to save the world we must have a plan, but no plan will work unless we meditate.” Trump doesn’t just mess with our laws, he messes with our head. He doesn’t just assault our institutions, he assaults our nervous system. There is a lot we need to do to deal with this menace in our midst, but in order to do so effectively we have to become very, very strong people. Think of yourself as a spiritual-political athlete this year. When you get depressed about what’s happening, just remember that we all do. Give yourself a couple of hours to feel it - neither drugs, alcohol, nor sugar are your friends at such a time, by the way - but then pull yourself up by your emotional bootstraps and get back in the game. We need to do that because it’s not a game. It is, quite possibly, the world as we know it that’s at stake.

There are millions and millions of people, here and all over the world, who know we are better than this. At a 2020 Democratic Presidential debate, I told President Trump that he had harnessed fear for political purposes but that we would harness love - and love would win. A lot has happened since then: the problem has gotten worse, but the solution is the same. We will harness love. And love will win.

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What keeps me up at night is the cruelty.

Tens of thousands of children, many of them American citizens and the vast majority of them kids of people who have done no harm to anyone, live with constant terror that Mommy or Daddy or grandparents or teachers will be snatched away at any moment. Those men in scary uniforms might break down the door, or snatch Mommy in the grocery store parking lot or take Daddy at the place where he works. If they are taken they’ll be sent to a place where where Mommy or Daddy might be hurt or even die or be sent off somewhere but we don’t know where. Sometimes, those mean men even take the children!

This is happening in America.

The paragraph above is not fiction; it describes innocent children, living all over this country, traumatized daily for no reason at all. Are they clutching teddy bears for comfort? Are they able to concentrate at school? What behavioral patterns are emerging from their underlying hysteria?

How can they possibly grow up not resenting this country? What is happening to the children of the ICE raids is child abuse, and a criminal act when done by the government is no less criminal.

Over sixty thousand people are in ICE detention on any given day now, and about 70 per cent of them have no criminal convictions. People who fled the worst violence elsewhere are now finding it here. People who were doing everything right, who were awaiting their green cards, showing up for their appointed immigration meetings, legitimately claiming and even granted asylum, all thrown into the mix as though they are common criminals. They are not granted Constitutionally protected due process, or even access to immigration lawyers.

We have put them in concentration camps. We have put them in concentration camps. We have put them in concentration camps. And the administration wouldn’t be spending $45 billion on a system of those camps if they weren’t planning on using them for a whole array of things.

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When members of the Third Reich were called barbarians, Hitler said they were “honored by the title.” We should not ignore that for those who design and execute the ICE raids, cruelty is not avoided; it seems to be the point. Some people get offended when ICE is compared to the German gestapo, arguing that such a comparison dishonors victims of the Holocaust. But how? As a Jew myself, I feel the opposite. It dishonors the victims of the Holocaust not to make the comparison. Whether people were being sent to work camps or to death camps, their terror at being taken was the same. They had heard the stories; they knew their fate.

When President Eisenhower led the liberation of Ohrdruf concentration camp in April of 1945, he was astounded by the proof of evils that he witnessed there. German citizens ran after him shouting, “We didn’t know! We didn’t know!” Eisenhower was adamant that with the smell of burning flesh less than a mile away, they should have known. And he told them so.

Eisenhower is also known to have commanded his entourage, “Start taking pictures! Take lots of pictures. Someday some sons of bitches are going to try to say that none of this even happened.” It did happen, however, though even today there are those still trying to tell us that it didn’t. We must never, ever, forget that it did.

Am I saying that what’s happening in American detainment camps today is as bad as Buchenwald or Auschwitz? No I’m not. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not detestable. And am I comparing the terror of Jewish children then, to the terror of children of immigrants in America today? Yes, I am. A terrified child is a terrified child.

Close your eyes and imagine what the children of the ICE raids are going through. We can’t comfort them by saying the detainment camps are decent places, because by all accounts they absolutely aren’t. We must not minimize the horror of this circumstance. We should allow our fury and allow our tears. No matter what the administration does to distract us, we must refuse to be distracted. We must not look away.

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First, there’s economics. A ruthless form of capitalism has left so many millions living in survival mode, people often lack the time or bandwidth to be really be there for the people closest to them. Second, an addiction to our screens has made us blind at times to what’s going on with the people we care about most, even those sitting right in front of us. And third, common psychotherapeutic models now teach us more about how to build walls between ourself and others, than teach us how to dissolve them.

While all of those factors are different, they emerge from a common place in consciousness. Modernity has leached from us our sense of divine connection to the world around us. Fortunately, we are on the verge of a Great Remembering.

Our underlying dis-ease, at its most essential level, is that we think that we are random beings living in a random universe. And we are not. We are one with each other and with God. Our sense that we were separate from a Higher Power, separate from nature, and separate from each other, has created a profound and psychologically dangerous rupture within ourselves. It has left us living lives that seem purposeless and without meaning. Sigmund Freud defined neurosis of “separation from self,” and we are a deeply neurotic society.

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None of this is a problem that can be fixed overnight. We are living through a whole systems breakdown and it requires a whole systems response.

Every prayer, every act of contrition, every moment of forgiveness, every act of mercy, every reaching out with kindness, every moment we show up even when it’s not convenient, every word of graciousness, every tender look, has a way of chipping away at the walls we have built up between us and among us. Most of us are good at monitoring the mistakes of others; too few of us are good enough at monitoring our own.

We’ve created personal habits, social attitudes, and economic systems that breed loneliness because they breed disconnection. They are like walls we built, but which we can choose to bring down.

When we experienced the turn of the new millennium, a friend told me about an interesting experience she had on a New York subway car that New Year’s Day. She had ridden the same train for years, and had never seen people on it talking too much or interacting with others. On that day however, the social contract simply changed. She said people were chatting, exchanging cookies, excitedly celebrating together the birth of something new. She told me how fun it was, and how much people were enjoying each other. Yet it occurred to her, she said, that nothing had really changed except our view of one another! People remembered, if even for just one day, that we are here with and for each other.

Each of us can choose to remember that. Everyone is carrying dreams, and longing, and the experience if not memories of suffering. One shift in perception, from “I’m here alone” to “I’m here to extend love wherever I go,” changes everything. No matter how lonely we are, there are those who are lonelier and could use our kindness. Who among us could not choose to reach out more?

Years ago, I founded an organization called Project Angel Food that delivered, and still delivers, food to homebound seriously ill patients. At the time we were in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and I couldn’t stand the idea of people suffering through that experience alone. Yet time and time again, volunteers told me that they got as much from delivering food and kindness and love, as the clients themselves could possibly be receiving. The world we are living in is changing now, from a civilization posited on fear and separation to one posited on unity and love. That is what people are longing for. One day, humanity will have remembered ourselves. And loneliness will be no more.

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The cancer is in America’s bones at this point, much deeper than any one man or even one political movement. We’re in a period of epic change and systems collapse, neither of which can be navigated by the superficial thinking of our political status quo.

Our power to rise from this lies on the level of values. We can’t just fight off bad guys forever; we need a renewed dedication to the good.

Change occurs when enough of us are willing to atone for the fact that the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world so strayed from dedication to our own First Principles, in too many cases even to human decency, for over half a century. As citizens we abided that. We have not been the nation we like to think we are.

Too many of us were willing to surrender our critical thinking to a crass and corrupt political industry, many thinking only of their own pocketbooks, and stood by while our country imploded from within. Dedication to the profundity of our Declaration of Independence and the responsibility to teach its principles to our children, both fell away like unimportant dead leaves. We countenanced obvious military adventurism, systems of increasing economic injustice, and ever-increasing destruction of the earth and its inhabitants.

None of us should now act shocked.

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This dark night of America’s soul need not be the end of our democracy, however, if we use it as a time for rethinking and regreening. The answer lies first on the level of the heart. Genuine contrition is what activates the power of redemption. Atonement for our national arrogance and recklessness. Humility before our Creator, Whomever or whatever we perceive that to be. All the powers of the world won’t put us back together again, if we’re not willing to look in the mirror. We had only two choices: to fall to our knees, or be brought to our knees. Obviously we chose the latter. But the good news is, we’re on our knees now.

This is a time of destruction, but also a time of new creation. It’s time of fundamental recalibration… a great fever that had to occur.

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The problem is not that we lack facts; the problem is that we lack vision, and we lack wisdom. We can see the dots but we’re not connecting them. There’s a lot of reporting on the trees, but what we need is a better view of the forest.

This morning I read that we don’t have to worry about Iran having missiles that can attack the United States - until 2035, that is. Um, I don’t want to ruin your day but please let that sink in. While the military might not call that “an immediate threat,” to me it still seems way too close for comfort.

Think about where you were nine years ago and then tell me that doesn’t seem like yesterday. How old are you likely to be in nine years? Think about the children in your life and calculate how old they’ll be in 2035. And if Iran will have missiles that can reach the U.S. by 2035, what other international player might have them as well?

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Over the last six decades, the United States has recklessly bombed other countries to the tune of trillions of dollars and well over a million lives lost. American soldiers have died fighting for…wait a minute, let me think…I’m sure there was some reason and I’ll remember it in a moment. From Southeast Asia to the Middle East, our taxpayer dollars have paid for the largest, most powerful military in the world to supposedly make us safer. But has it not done the opposite? We have done little more than throw our weight around, create havoc, and make huge fortunes for the matrix of U.S. war merchants now called the military-technological-industrial complex. Vietnam, anybody? Iraq? Afghanistan? All that “defense spending” has not defended us. We have created enemies for the United States all over the world…and apparently one particular enemy, now nursing a sense of revenge that could well last decades, will have missiles that can reach us by 2035. Think about that just a little bit more, please. Iran will have missiles that can reach us by 2035.

We’ve been inching up towards a trillion dollars in annual defense expenditures for years, and President Trump now says he needs $1.5T to create his “dream military.” Given how much we’re depleting our military with this war on Iran, he’s already asking for more. His new military budget would be paid for by cutting the Environmental Protection Agency in half, plus making other severe cuts to programs involving health, housing, and education.

So why have we been throwing trillions of dollars into the coffers of the defense industry when forty per cent of Americans have only $500 in a savings account? Because the American people have been fed the ruse that all our military spending - more than twice that of all other countries combined - is needed to keep us safe. Wake up, my friends. America’s war machine has not kept us safe. It has made us anything but safe. And it’s reasonable to assume we might one day pay the price personally for our reckless, abusive military actions over the last 60 years. 2035 is not very far way, and sooner than we think we might have to drop that phrase “foreign wars.” Once those missiles can fly over the Pacific or the Atlantic, there will be nothing “foreign” about them. A lot more than higher prices at the gas pump are at stake here.

America’s elite political and media institutions are reluctant to recognize the abject insanity of our military trajectory over the last 60 years. They’re not amused when you even mention it, actually, and in my experience they’ll come after you if you do. You’re met with derision if you talk about a Department of Peace. You’re mocked for saying we shouldn’t just fight wars, we have to proactively wage peace. You’re deemed “unqualified” when arguing that our national security would be bolstered more by our ability to educate our children than by our ability to add to the seven thousand bombs in our nuclear arsenal. There won’t be any follow-up questions, because obviously such conversation is unserious. In fact, it’s the foundational narratives of American political leadership over the last few decades - from economics to war - that have been, if the human race is to survive itself, unqualified and unserious. Those narratives need to radically change.

There is no danger obvious to people now that wasn’t obvious decades ago, if we were willing to look. How woo woo, how kooky, to think maybe just maybe peace and love are the only way.

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Feminine power derives from a different place in consciousness than does masculine power. They are equal, and equally important. Yet throughout our society there’s a suspicion of any woman who didn’t derive her authority from a man or a male-dominated institution. If you’ve come up the ladder their way, you have a chance at sharing power. But only if. In a patriarchal system - including the many women who have chosen consciously or unconsciously to mimic it - there’s a refusal to give credence to the idea that there are simply other ladders than the ones they see. The only power the patriarchy recognizes is its own. The power of a mother, the power of a philosopher, the power of an artist - basically anything right-brain - means nothing to a system that has separated the head from the heart. And that’s exactly what the patriarchy does.

This isn’t about women being in control instead of men being in control; it’s about the human heart in all of us being in control. The Australian feminist Germaine Greer said famously, ‘The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy, but fraternity.” Yet that can’t be achieved if women’s voices, and women’s power, are constantly diminished, minimized, or mocked. It also can’t happen if women continue to conspire with the patriarchy - either by aligning with it, or by choosing to be silent when another woman is challenging its values and being punished for the effort. Enough already. We’re letting some of humanity’s best ideas fall to the wayside, and some of our worst ideas take center stage.

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This isn’t about men versus women. It’s about a system that’s failed us, and which we need to let go of now. Can you imagine what public policy would look like in the United States if Congress were made up entirely of women with children under five years old? A little more for education and healthcare, you think? A little more care for the earth, safety of the food supply, cleaner water and air? Maybe a little less bomb throwing and a little more peace building…?

Children aren’t old enough to vote, so they’re not a constituency. They’re not old enough to work, so they have no financial leverage. Protecting their rights must come from enlightened adults, and women must lead the charge. Not just the cry; the charge. Our government is not set up to protect women or children - in fact, we’re sliding backwards these days - and that will not change unless we change it. At best, the patriarchy ignores women. At worst, it actually hates us.

Dismantling the patriarchy will take more than an awakening among men; it will also take an awakening among women. It will take all our courage to change the course of human history, but change it we must if our grandchildren are to thrive. It will take more than women being in leadership positions, or any positions of power. It will take women being willing to use our leadership, and to use our power, to introduce humanitarian values into situations where they are now dangerously absent.

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What we think of as our most pressing issues are usually manifestations of the same underlying problem: Gandhi’s point that “humanity is not in its right mind.” The evolutionary leap that will save us is not a collection of data or an advance in technology. It’s a change in our prevailing mindset, from one ruled by separation and fear to one ruled by unity and love.

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The guardians of the status quo would argue it’s naïve to think we can make love and compassion the organizing principle of human civilization. In fact, what’s naive is to think humanity will necessarily survive on this planet for another hundred years if we do not at least try.

We don’t need a majority to change the world. We need a critical mass of people who are willing to consider that there might be another way. Every loving thought, every moment of atonement or forgiveness, every prayer for peace or minute of meditation, affects a larger field of possibility. Every one of us, every moment of the day, with every thought we think, can help to change the trajectory of future world events.

Envision a world at peace so we can reverse engineer from there.

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Nothing strikes at the heart of democracy like an effort to suppress the vote. And if passed by the Senate, that’s exactly what the SAVE Act would do.

It’s important to recognize that this piece of proposed legislation is just one tree in a much larger forest. The political chaos in our midst today, while made up of a thousand individual hits on our Constitutional system, is in fact all part of a single pattern of assault. There are a lot of battles, but there’s actually only one war. Whoever is behind all this - the theories range from Peter Thiel to Vladimir Putin, from Christian Nationalists to white supremacists, to a band of Curtis Yarvin-inspired tech bros seeking to create a system of corporate feudalism, to all of the above - the effort now being mounted has one larger goal: to destroy America as we know it, and replace it with authoritarian rule.

As long as we’re seeking to defend our freedoms one hit at a time - failing to recognize the larger war now being waged against American democracy itself - as citizens we’re likely to be psychologically if not politically overwhelmed. Whoever is behind all this, their army is stunningly relentless. One day history books will record the massive, multi-tiered assault machine they’re currently leveling at us. We’re in the midst right now of deciding whether we successfully push them back, or ultimately succumb.

According to Abraham Lincoln, “While the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years.” The quote is particularly striking because 1) it acknowledges that an administration of extreme “wickedness or folly” could indeed come about, and 2 ) it makes it clear that only “the people” can ward off its evil. During one four-year term, there is a primary tool provided by the U.S. Constitution by which the people can make sure such an effort cannot succeed: our midterm elections.

That’s why the SAVE Act is so important, and so dangerous. The Trump team isn’t going after minor organs of democracy anymore; they’re going after the one major organ without which democracy cannot survive. Our elections have never been as fair and free as they should be, yet this is one of those areas - far too common these days - where efforts to make things better have been stymied, and efforts to make them infinitely worse are on the rise.

The President is many things, but he is not stupid. He has said he won’t sign one more piece of legislation until the Senate passes the SAVE Act, and that it must go to the front of the line in a list of Republican priorities. That’s how adamant (uh, scared) he is that the bill’s passage is needed to ensure a Republican win in the midterms.

Politics today is a war of algorithms. I recently had dinner with some very intelligent, lovely people who think Trump is the best thing since sliced bread. Part of America’s crisis is that we’re not seeing the same news reports, and certainly not viewing what we do see through any kind of common filter. Losing Walter Cronkite on TV every night was a huge crack in America’s foundation. Some people are still telling me, “Take Trump seriously but do not take him literally” while he is literally shredding the U.S. Constitution, using gestapo techniques on innocent people, building concentration camps, canceling mail-in voting, trying to federalize elections, and seeking to rig the midterm elections.

The Republican argument behind the SAVE Act is that there is rampant fraud in US elections, although not one reputable source has proven anything of the kind. When asked to give one piece of evidence that such fraud exists, Speaker Mike Johnson responded “We’re not going to litigate that now.” Of course he says that, because Johnson knows that fraud is not the issue. The problem for him is that not the right kind of people are voting.

For Trump, all this is sheer crassness and authoritarianism: if people have a problem with him, he simply wants to suppress the voices of those people so he can stay in power. But for Johnson and many like him, this problem is much more ideological - and in a way, more threatening. Johnson and his ilk sincerely believe that unless their white supremacist, Christian Nationalist agenda is forced down the throats of the American people, then this country is going to hell in a hand basket. And remember, to them hell is a very real place, filled with fire and brimstone and eternal damnation. I don’t say that disrespectfully, because they have every right to believe that. What they do not have the right to do is sabotage the democratic process, however. In the United States of America, We the People, through free and fair elections, determine what we want this country to be.

America has become, and is becoming even more so, a multi-ethnic society. To many of us that’s the full actualization of the American dream, while to many on the far Right it’s a threat of cultural annihilation. The SAVE Act is their effort to make sure that only the right people vote. And for everyone else, the plan is to make voting hard, filled with bureaucratic and expensive hurdles to the point where people are so frustrated and exhausted that we just give up.

Thomas Jefferson said the only safe repository for power is in the hands of the people. Authoritarian states - and authoritarian institutions - have a very big problem with that. One thing being made very clear by our current circumstances is how naive it is for any generation of Americans to assume our freedoms are ever rock solid guaranteed. As Lincoln reminded us, every generation must be vigilant as well as virtuous. Unfortunately we were not, and we’re playing catch up now.

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Denying the vote to all but white men has been a problem in this country since our founding. From passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the vote in 1921, to the Voting Rights Act in 1965, generations before us have worked hard and sacrificed much to ameliorate that. The Trump administration represents in many ways the regression of our political consciousness, as they seek to codify in any way possible the ability of their people to have the final say in everything. One of their techniques is to nullify the rights of women. As Margaret Atwood, author of the Handmaid’s Tale, has pointed out repeatedly, suppressing the voices and power of women has been a common totalitarian technique. Scott Yenor, ironically named Chair of the American Citizenship Initiative at The Heritage Foundation and now a main proponent of Project 2025, unabashedly celebrates a world in which women shut up now and basically do as we are told. Telling half the population that the country is better off without our contributions beyond kitchen, bedroom or nursery is extraordinarily perverse. Atwood points out that fascism doesn’t happen all at once but rather through gradual, incremental changes. We can too often become accustomed to those changes, not realizing the extreme nature of such oppression until it’s too late to do anything about it.

In truth, democracy is radical. To an authoritarian regime it’s the biggest enemy, which is why over the last few years there’s been a propaganda effort to convince Americans that we’re not a democracy! You’ve probably seen this show up on your feed at some point: “We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” Which is like arguing that if we have windows we can’t possibly have doors. A republic is the way we organize ourselves; democracy is the way we govern ourselves. It’s true that the founders did not want direct democracy, which they rightfully felt could turn into mob rule. In a representative democracy, however, We the People elect who we wish to represent us in Washington. And without free and fair elections - either within a party or within the country - the machinery of democracy is jammed.

Voting should not be stymied; if anything it should be made easier in America. Our citizens should automatically be registered at the age of 18. Elections should be held on a Saturday, or even a holiday created to make it easier for people to get to the polls. There’s something perverse about a democratic government making it harder for its own citizens to vote, no matter what the Trump administration uses as a ruse to cover up their real intentions. In Australia, people are fined for not voting! Gerrymandering should be prohibited. Term limits should be seriously debated. The SAVE Act would simply make voting harder, less fair, and basically worse in every way.

GOP Sen. Murkowski is the one GOP Senator so far who has said she will vote against the SAVE Act , correctly pointing out that it would disenfranchise her constituents. Even if it didn’t suppress the vote, it would definitely depress the vote. If you’re a citizen of the United States, it shouldn’t be so damned hard to cast your vote or to have it count.

So the Action Alert is obvious. Spread the word as best you can, making sure that everyone you know is aware of the perniciousness of this piece of legislation. Public pressure means everything. Particularly if you have a GOP Senator, call them at 202 224 3121 and tell them NOT to vote for the SAVE Act. It’s not a voter protection bill; it’s a voter suppression bill. The people behind it know this, regardless of whether or not we do. The alarm is ringing, and we cannot afford to snooze.

The President now wants to replace the Ionic columns at the front of the North portico of the White House with Corinthian. The White House isn’t grand enough for him, standing is it does with a profound and simple dignity; his style is grandiose. His physical changes to the White House are a direct reflection of his view of the country. He has no respect for - much less knowledge of - our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, or American history. His will is to destroy and rebuild our very foundations, and if we continue to let him then he will. With his plan for the new ballroom, for instance - obviously a cover for a plan to move the main functioning of the US government to a huge underground bunker, away from anyone’s ability to see or oversee - he plans to make the Oval Office little more than a set piece, like a Hollywood prop.

This isn’t a “negative” thing to point out. There’s nothing negative about yelling “Fire!” when a house is burning. The sooner we realize the extremism of their plans, and how far they’ve already come in effectuating them, the sooner we’ll rise adequately to the challenge of interrupting them. So many fronts have already fallen - from law firms, to media, to universities, to Congress, to SCOTUS. The one that HASN’T fallen is We the People. Minnesotans have led the way.

Where they went, we all need to follow.

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Think of this now as a time for non-violent guerrilla warfare. Don’t wait to be told what to do. The curtain is up and you’re on. Within the confines of legal and non-violent, do ANYTHING - on the streets or online or in the Courts or in conversation. Jam the machinery of a fascist juggernaut. Wait for no one, just do it. Jump out from behind the trees. No one’s coming to save us now; we’re it. Each of us. Think collective zeitgeist, the symphonic sound of “Hell no!” that will be heard around the world.

Our political superpower doesn’t derive from an external source. It’s not one big worldly power, but millions of small acts of resistance done with great love. From that will come our energy and our momentum. Hating anyone will generate energy, but only temporarily. It’s like the white sugar of political activism; it’s adrenaline but then you crash. It’s ultimately a waste of time. Be empowered by love for this country and what it is when we get it right; by humble atonement for some ways in which we’ve gotten it so wrong; and by love for our planet, and for our children and our children’s children. When hatred speaks loudly, love cannot afford to whisper.

One world is crumbling, but another is already rising from the ruins. Be death doula to the old and birth doula to the new. These are days of trials and tribulations, to be sure, but these are also days of signs and wonders - no sign more wonderful than the spirit born in each of us when we choose to rise to this moment. You will be joined by what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “cosmic companionship.” You’ll hear an angel whisper in your ear at times: “March on.”

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Four American wars are occurring simultaneously. There’s the war against Iran, obviously, but also the ICE war against immigrants; the ongoing economic war against the working people of the United States; and a Cold Civil War, those seeking to protect our democratic Constitutional system pitted against those seeking to subvert it. All those wars are raging as we speak, though some are declared and some are not.

The war on Iran is getting the most attention now and for good reason, given that it could kill us all if it turns into WW3.

President Trump says he decided to initiate the war after talking to Jared, Steve, Pete and Marco. You’ll notice there isn’t one military commander on that list. Lincoln had Ulysses S. Grant, FDR had Eisenhower, and Trump has…well, he sort of doesn’t have anyone. Technically the head of our Joint Chiefs of Staff is General Dan Caine, but Caine rarely gets a public mention from the President; you never get the feeling that he’s really in the room. Remember in 2015 when Trump said, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do”? He meant that. Last year President Trump purged the armed forces of people with the highest military expertise and ability. He prefers sycophants and lackeys who will simply do what he tells them to do, to seasoned professionals whose opinions might challenge his own. This means he has launched a major war against Iran in the absence of the most serious military consultation.

They’re closing the Straight of Hormuz? “Oops! Who would have thought of that?” Um, basically any eighth grader who had considered it for more than fifteen minutes. The President isn’t big on thinking in terms of likely consequences down the road, on anything really. He’s basically a little boy playing with legos, although that’s a bit unfair to little boys. The greater danger here is not the President’s lack of maturity, but his lack of conscience. He referred to the bombing of ships as “more fun” for his gang than capturing them. It’s hard to overstate the danger that this man poses to the world.

Meanwhile, the new leader of Iran is Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father was killed by a US strike on the first day of the war. And the strike didn’t just kill his father. It also killed his mother, his wife, and at least one of his children. So….Epic Fury? Meet epic fury. It’s now reasonable to believe that Iran’s current regime will be, at least for now, even more vicious than the last.

If we think Iran was a threat before this war, it’s hard to imagine that they won’t be a bigger threat afterwards. The only alternative scenario would be complete regime change, which the administration now says it isn’t after. The administration also told Congress that it isn’t after the destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, so at this point no one knows what they’re after. Iran says it can keep up the war for as long as takes for them to win, while Trump will keep it up for as long as he think’s it’s politically helpful for him. Sans a miracle, no matter which way things go from here Trump has created a disaster for years to come.

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The psychology of Donald Trump has been analyzed ad infinitum, but I’d like to take a stab at some of the others. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have a characteristic common among multi-billionaires: they have a hard time imagining a situation they can’t just buy themselves out of, therefore lack appropriate caution when playing a high stakes game. Pete Hegseth has the pomposity of those who know they’re in over their head. Marco Rubio is a genuine American tragedy, trading what had for years seemed like a principled conservatism for a chance at proximity to power. And Bibi Netanyahu? Like Trump, he is a sociopath. Neither man has a conscience, or any sense of morality whatsoever. All of them together - plus the men and women who enable them - are among the modern barbarian class now plaguing modern civilization.

We’re being led by sophisticated maniacs. They derive their power from a certain bizarre soullessness, but that’s also their ultimate weakness. For when the American spirit has once again grown fierce and strong, and the forces of justice have gathered, then peace will yet prevail. This isn’t happy talk, because the season upon us is not happy. America’s day of reckoning is here. We will be humbled by this, but we will not be destroyed. And we will have learned so much.

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I’ve done a lot of international travel recently, not because I intended to do a global swing but because things simply turned out that way.

From Brazil I traveled to Argentina, England, the UAE, India, Australia, and now back to five cities in the United States. You never learn as much about yourself as you do in relationship with other people, and you never learn as much about your country as you do when you experience other places.

With the exception of the UAE of course, where such conversation is more than strongly discouraged, people were eager to talk about the same political dynamics we’re talking about in the United States. Having said that, by the way, I had a beautiful experience in Abu Dhabi. I had plenty of meaningful conversations, just not political ones.

Regarding other countries I visited, America is in no position to preach to anyone about anything right now, and I knew that. In England and Australia, I frequently pointed out that among free democratic nations, a star player on the team is clearly benched for a while. I promised that millions of us are doing everything we can to get our country back in the game, but that until then I hope they’ll all rise up, play their best, and pick up the slack so democracy can remain a winning team! It seems clear to everyone that there has been a big tree syndrome going on here for decades, the United States so overshadowing the “middle powers” that some of them didn’t grow as tall as they might have under the shade of that big tree. The recalibration occurring now – and they’re all aware that such recalibration is essential – will in the long run be good for everyone, I believe. But as most of us are aware, “in the long run” could be a long, long time.

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My talk last weekend was in Chicago, for International Women’s Day. It was hosted by ALTAR, a place I highly recommend to you Chicagoans out there. I began with a brutally honest inventory of what’s gone wrong in the Women’s Movement in the U.S. over the last fifty years. How did we go from Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm and what seemed like such a promise of new possibilities for women, to Donald Trump in the White House and a Phase 2 Project 2025 intent on rolling back whatever gains we’ve made?

I think such dissection is important, if we’re to course-correct on fundamental levels. I’m only taking on a few issues here but hopefully they can inspire further thought.

Among other things, over the years we seem to have lost a sense of sisterhood. In the early days, we were all aware that none of us would get there unless all of us got there. If we weren’t loyal to one another, the patriarchal status quo would divide and conquer us at every turn. And indeed it did. A woman who thinks female empowerment is simply about she herself getting ahead, is applying patriarchal values to her efforts to beat the patriarchy!

Also, while the Women’s Movement paved the way for extraordinary advances for millions of individual women – before 1974, a woman couldn’t even get an American Express card without her husband’s permission! - we didn’t address the deeper psychological roots of misogyny. In many cases, we ended up internalizing them. We didn’t realize how important it would be to avoid the temptation to be co-opted by the patriarchal institutions we were let into. There seemed to be this magical belief that once we got there, all would be well.

So yes, it was great that women got seats on boards, high corporate positions, and so forth. But for the most part, we weren’t invited to bring our feminine values with us. We were simply invited to parrot the patriarchal values already in play. We ended up fueling those values more than challenging them, adding our talents and resources to an already existing status quo.

If we were invited to the table when men were discussing the corporate bottom line, for instance, it wasn’t appreciated if we piped up to say we weren’t totally satisfied that the product we were selling had been tested enough for child safety. Our voice was then far less appreciated, with labels such as “not a team player” or “difficult” or “not supportive of the company” often written next to our name. Knowing this, and so grateful simply to be in the room, millions of women began to self-censor. We shrank so as not to offend, be called bitchy, or kooky, or whatever else.

None of this was or is men versus women by the way, as a system that favors men devours them too. The imbalance it causes does harm to both sexes psychologically, emotionally, and physically.

It’s painful to realize all the ways that we’ve ended up sliding backwards as a society over the last fifty years. But sometimes we have to recognize what went wrong before we can fundamentally make things right. It’s not as easy as simply saying, “Raise your voice!” For women (as for any formerly disempowered group), if you haven’t been able to say what you really felt in the public realm, and your mother hadn’t been able to, and her mother hadn’t been able to, then finding your voice can be hard. At first it comes out angry perhaps, or screechy. Then you find yourself on a constant seesaw, not knowing whether to eat your truth or to express it in a way that may or may not repel others. It can take a long time, even years, to get to the point where you own your "Yes” and you own your “No,” yet can do so with sophistication and without anger. Then you’re clear, you’re peaceful, and you’re heard.

Another trap we fell into was thinking that certain institutions were our friends, when in fact they saw us more in terms of what we could do for them than what they were willing to do for us - and what they were willing to do for our children. We were told to “be patient,” that we had to go for “what’s achievable,” that “we just need to help them win re-election” and then we would get what we thought was important. Meanwhile, no we did not get universal healthcare for us or for our children, we did not get better cultural or educational opportunities for our children, we did not get a healthier or more peaceful planet - and we did not demand it. More often than not, we didn’t support other women when they did stand for those things. If a woman is made to appear radioactive - a common punishment for challenging the status quo - then other women too often fear that supporting her would make them radioactive too! We continued to believe those who said, in essence, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, we got this,” when in fact they so did not. We had the strange belief that they were Wizards of Oz who somehow knew things that we didn’t know, when in fact what they desperately needed to know was the knowledge we carry in our hearts. And we ourselves are responsible for that. The Wizards of Oz were simply weak and broken men, hiding behind a curtain, and we should have pulled that curtain back long ago. It’s important to understand why we didn’t, and become the women who are more than ready to do so now. Having broken through so many external chains, it’s time to dissolve the internal ones. We were bound; now let’s be free.

Meanwhile the world just continued, and still continues, to burn. They say there’s no more money for our children, no more money for their education, no more money for our health, but goodness how money miraculously appears when it’s needed to wage more war! What could possibly be more urgent than for women to rise now, not only to use our voices but to grab more levers of power and to use them to change the world?

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*I’ll be leading a Wise Women’s Retreat this coming weekend in Boone, North Carolina, for those of you looking to dig deeper into the spiritual in order to fly higher in the world. We’ll mine the intimate relationship between inner and outer change, releasing old wounds and embracing new strengths, activating our inherent power to be the woman we most long to be at this sacred and urgent hour.

May the people of the United States be blessed.

May the people of Israel be blessed.

May we all be blessed.

May the people of the UAE be blessed.

May the people of Saudi Arabia be blessed.

May the people of Qatar be blessed.

May we all be blessed.

May the people of Bahrain be blessed.

May the people of Kuwait be blessed.

May the people of Iraq be blessed.

May we all be blessed.

May people everywhere be protected from the madness.

May the walls that divide us be dissolved in Your Light.

May mothers and fathers and their children,

Lovers and friends,

All the people of the world

Be blessed and comforted at this agonizing hour.

Dear God,

Remove war from our minds, from our hearts, and from our world.

Amen.

In January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech that gained a lot of attention. It clearly rubs him the wrong way that the United States - Donald Trump, in particular - bullies, belittles, and seeks to economically exploit his country, and his message for a quite a while has been “We’re not gonna take it anymore.” Clearly he means it. In preparation for a phone meeting with President Trump early last year, Carney’s office reportedly told the White House that if during the meeting Trump made any reference to Canada’s being America’s 51st State, or referred to Carney as “Governor” (both of which Trump was known to do with Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau), the Prime Minister would immediately drop off the call.

Carney’s current posture takes things beyond symbolism, however, as evidenced by his speech at Davos. So much so in fact that many now call him “the leader of the free world.” That description usually refers to the President of the United States, of course, but no one looking at anything from ICE raids in which over four thousand people have been illegally detained, to the building of detainment camps more accurately described as concentration camps, calls America “the free world” anymore. Having traveled internationally over the last several months, I’ve gotten the distinct impression that whether or not Americans are willing to face facts about America’s descent into neo-fascism, other countries already have. Having gone through stages of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, they’ve reached the acceptance stage and they’re ready to move on.

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Carney referred to the current shift from America-gets-it-wrong-a-lot-of-the-time-but-we-can-still-trust-it to America-gets-it-wrong-a-lot-of-the-time-and-we-can’t-count-on-Trump-to-even-try not as a transition, but as a rupture. And according to Carney, the democratic world order should reconstitute itself accordingly. We are no longer living in any semblance of a rules-based world order, he argued - a point referenced by other world leaders as well - but one in which great powers simply do what they do and everyone else has to merely acquiesce. This needn’t be, argued Carney, if that “everyone else” gets together to form its own vortex of power.

Carney didn’t just get a standing ovation for his speech; he created an earthquake. He seemed to be saying that if the United States wouldn’t lead with values, he would. He exhorted other “middle powers” to join him in initiating what is essentially a new power center in the world. And that’s exactly what they’re doing now. Carney is traveling to India, Australia and Japan for meetings this week.

As an American traveling to Europe, India, and Australia over the last several weeks, my civilian message has been similar to Carney’s. I’ve said, “Imagine the great democracies of the world are a big basketball team. Well, your star player has been benched. I promise you, in America a lot of us are doing everything we can to change that, but until then it is what it is. You know it, and I know it. So that means other players need to get out onto the floor now. I hope you will!” Democracy is bigger than America, and it needs to survive and thrive in the world regardless of the hit it’s taking here at home.

On the other side of this dark chapter in our national story, the United States will be a better country for what we are going through. Among other things, we will be more humble. Having gained tremendous power and in many ways both squandered and misused it, we will have been taken down a notch, that’s true. But if we’re clear that this crisis will be not a defeat but a course-correction - that ultimately it will return to us our own lost soul - then we will echo Lincoln’s words in the Gettysburg Address, that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” The fact that other democracies will carry the ball while we’re going through all this - gaining more of their own power and building a more righteous, sovereign relationship with us - is not a bad thing. It will be better for the world.

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As you’re probably aware, the United States and Israel have begun a war with Iran. Full scale. No holding back. Very much for real.

Forget the Constitutional demand that the President go through Congress before declaring war, by the way. There’s no more even pretending now. The Constitution is little more to them than an administrative hindrance. Congressional debate is like a joke to those guys.

And now we are where we are. We are at war with Iran. The average American might not realize the forces that have been unleashed here. It could be a quick devastating war, or it could be a prolonged devastating war with consequences beyond what any of us can even imagine.

Thousands of mothers and fathers are grasping their children now, trying to reassure them. Soldiers are dying who have no idea why we’re doing this. People who don’t have a political bone in their body are rushing into bomb shelters, praying for safety. Among the leaders involved, there are no good guys in any of this - only various gradations of the spiritually blind.

The coming days will see many tears. On the other side of this - and that’s a huge theoretical - we must be willing to do things differently. And truly mean it. None of our hearts will be untouched by what is unfolding now. The drama of these days will either purify the human race, or it could end it. Our addiction to war is literally killing us.

In the words of John F. Kennedy, Jr., “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” We must learn to wage peace as effectively as we now wage war.

I saw, when I was running for President, how the pseudo-sophisticates in American politics and media treated the very idea of a Department of Peace. They treat such an idea with condescension and smirks, as though the merchants of war are the only grown-ups in the room. I saw widespread ignorance of the fact that peacebuilding is even a thing, much less with statistically proven results at preventing and reducing conflict. In truth, if we’d had a Department of Peace playing peace games over the last few years rather than just a Department of War playing war games, we would have a different world today.

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I’m thinking this morning about a quote from President Franklin Roosevelt called I Hate War, inscribed on the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

From the United States supporting Israel’s continued war on Gaza, to war between Russia and Ukraine, to the madness in Sudan - and now war with Iran - humanity is testing our fate. We cannot continue this way. In the words of A Course in Miracles, there is a “limit beyond which we cannot miscreate.”

All of this is happening, of course, at the same time that Trump seems to be revving up to rig the 2026 midterm elections. I will have much to say about that, of course. It’s genuinely overwhelming. But as tempting as it might be to put our heads in the sand, friends do not let friends sit this out. These indeed are extraordinary times. Let’s thank God that we are extraordinary people. We do not serve Him, or each other, by pretending we are anything less. May our prayers, our thoughts and our behavior now reflect the inner greatness that is God’s gift to all of us. The times are dark, but we are filled with Light.

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