J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination."

Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008
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President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

There is something about politicians - particularly Democrats, I think - that makes them rise to their best when they're making concession speeches.

All the way back to Michael Dukakis, I remember thinking as I heard him concede, "Well if you'd been that person during the campaign, you might have won!" When Al Gore conceded to George Bush at the end of the 2000 debacle, he showed at last the deep passion that had been so obscured by his wooden delivery on the campaign trail. And Hillary Clinton finally broke through on Saturday; she showed at last some humility and authenticity, the absence of which had made so many of us unable to support her in her campaign against Obama. She lost the election, but it looks like she won her soul back. And with that, I think she restarted her career.

Until Saturday, that is. The loss of this campaign seems to have taken Hillary Clinton to her knees, and who among us cannot appreciate the pain of that. But it is everyone's destiny to finally get there, not as an end to anything but our own outsized egos, and the beginning of the process of finding our true selves.

I did not support Hillary Clinton in her race for the White House, but as she gave her speech on Saturday, I found myself spontaneously getting up from my seat, giving her a standing ovation in the middle of my hotel room and applauding her loudly as she spoke. What ended for her is small compared to what finally has begun for her. She has always been good -- and now, at last, I have a feeling that she might become great.

Finally, she spoke from her heart. And my heart heard.

Tribune Media Services (For release 12/6/07)

In the Fantasy Middle East, the troop surge is helping plucky Iraq get its act together; and Iran, as serious a threat as ever and still lusting to start World War III, awaits liberation by the superpower known as "Johnny Democracy."

In the reality version, our legacy is bad water, cancer and social chaos. Iraq has, by one scientific extrapolation, surpassed the million mark in war dead and continues to rack up other numbers (4 million internal and external refugees, for instance, but not to worry, only 133 of them got into the U.S. this year) that . . . I dunno, maybe it's just me . . . seem antithetical to the idea of democracy. And of course, as the latest National Intelligence Estimate has just embarrassingly informed the world, Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program four years ago.

War has America.

Like it or not, all the war protest in the many forms in which it is currently flowering — from the impeach-a-dope movement to the public rallies to the political dissent to the courageous independent reporting that gives citizens unprecedented access to war-zone reality — does not a nation make. Only war and war culture do that, which means, it's infinitely easier to start a war than it is to stop or prevent one, because going to war, however gratuitously, is just a nation being itself, doing what it was built to do.

And, as we witness these days with the behavior of so many Democratic congressmen, even a politician who has no enthusiasm for or in fact "opposes" a given war will nevertheless support it by default in far more ways than he or she will dare commit the patriotic heresy of attempting to outright thwart it.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in "Blood Rites," her extraordinary 1997 examination of the history of the passions of war, writes of the evolution of the phenomenon: "Meanwhile, war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions, rather than to just a handful of craftsmen and professional soldiers. It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures."

Saying this, I return to the figure of a million war dead in Iraq, pause in horrified awe that, one, it could be possible, and two, it hasn't made mainstream headlines, where big, round numbers normally scream with significance.

The estimate, by the U.K. organization Just Foreign Policy and corroborated by the market research firm Opinion Research Business, extrapolates from data published just over a year ago in the respected British medical journal Lancet, which indicated a violent-death toll, as of May 2006, of 650,000. The death rate has been accelerating in the past year, making the current estimate of 1.2 million dead at least feasible.

And I mention this number with the caveat that it refers only to deaths directly attributable to the war: by bomb, missile, bullet, IED, etc. The total indirect war dead, from disease caused by the war's stupendous environmental contamination combined with the destruction of Iraq's medical infrastructure, may be incalculable.

But again, so what? And the fact that the war, in times that are otherwise so tight we have to cut back on actual security expenditures, is running up a tab of, oh, a buck a nanosecond and will tally maybe $2 trillion when all bills are in, gets a double so what. That won't stop it.

Media coverage of this debacle has, admittedly, worn a frowny face of late, but it has stopped short of bringing the wasteland Bush's war on terror is creating into our living rooms. The delicate problem the war-media face is to draw down this disaster with face-saving decorum and dissipate blame to the extent possible so that no high-level people are punished; and, above all, to be protective of future wars so that "Iraq syndrome" doesn't do some sort of permanent damage to military culture or, God forbid, the defense budget.

The Bush presidency has pushed the paradox of nationalism to a crisis. We owe it to Iraq's million dead, and to our own wounded future, to stand for the impossible. The building of human societies that have transcended war begins today.

- - -

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

© 2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

While Americans are celebrating the holidays in a land of plenty, we're reminded of those who live in places where food they need merely to survive is unavailable to them.

This letter is what you might think of as a "Prayer Alert." Tens of thousands of Somalians, victims seeking refuge from the cruel and bitter fighting there, now endure the unimaginable suffering of starvation. Their humanitarian crisis is exacerbated by the fact that, given the violence in the region, no aid organization can safely make it through with food for them. All the world can do is bear witness to the agony of these people. And pray.

For those of us who believe, as it is written in A COURSE IN MIRACLES, that "prayer is the medium of miracles," I ask you to join with me in praying for the suffering, starving refugees of Somalia. May there be a miracle somehow, that food might make its way to them. May the God who parted the waters of the Red Sea now part the waters for all who suffer.

Dear God,
Please help the people of Somalia
and elsewhere
who do not have food,
who watch their children starve,
who face the agony of unimaginable
and unnecessary suffering.
May miracles light the way
and cast this darkness
from the earth.
May our lives be lifted
that we might serve,
and somehow be of use,
dear God,
to You, and to them.
Amen

A little humor this time....

And Happy Thanksgiving!

Marianne

They're back! Church Bulletins! Thank God for the church ladies with typewriters. These sentences actually appeared in church bulletins or were announced at church services.

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The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.
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The sermon this morning: "Jesus Walks on the Water." The sermon tonight:"Searching for Jesus."
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Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday at 8 PM in the recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the King.
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Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.
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I recommend that you run, not walk, to see Charles Ferguson's documentary "NO END IN SIGHT."

A hugely important film....

Marianne

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A New Order of the Ages

There is a principle in A Course in Miracles stating that it is not up to us what we learn, but only whether we learn through joy or through pain. In a universe that is, quite literally, the ongoing evolutionary impulse to love -- the spiritual process through which Love extends itself throughout space and time -- the individual's only true assignment is to learn to actualize the love within.

Where we have lessons to learn, the universe conspires to teach us. At first, the lessons are easy enough, even pleasant to learn. We're given the opportunity to learn, with joy, how to live our lives with more integrity and love.

Yet whatever lesson we refuse to learn, comes round again until we do -- each time appearing in a more sobering form, with more serious implications should we refuse to learn it. We do have free will, but we do not have the freedom to slow down the universe. Our learning fuels the momentum of the universe, which will not be allowed to stop. One way or the other, we will learn what we need to learn … even if we have to learn it through suffering.

I think that is where Western Civilization -- particularly American civilization -- is today. There are lessons we keep refusing to learn, and we are bordering on having to learn them through pain. A nation is simply a collection of individuals, and must follow the same growth imperatives as do any of its members. Just as individuals are forced to grow, and to change where necessary, so is a country. There is ultimately no survival where there is no adaptation to change.

In fact, America is going to change. The only question is whether we will choose to change by embracing wisdom -- repudiating the lies of a dysfunctional, increasingly dangerous worldview of an economic system predicated on the goal of short-term economic gain for the privileged few -- or we will be forced by circumstances to make a quantum leap into our next stage of growth, embracing humanitarian concern as the new organizing principle of human civilization. The only real question at this point is how much suffering will have to occur before we wake up to the lesson before us. We can change now, making the transition fairly peacefully (not that violence does not already rage); or we can refuse to change, thereby inviting a greater intensity of disaster with every day we wait.

In A Course in Miracles, it is written that some people would rather die than change their mind.

Our situation today is similar to that of President DeKlerk of South Africa in 1990. A tipping point had been reached in global awareness; the end of apartheid was an idea whose time had come. DeKlerk could see saw the writing on the wall, reporting to his fellow Afrikaners that the jig was up: South Africa would have to change. The only question before them was whether the transition to the end of apartheid would come with inestimable bloodshed, or with relative peace. White Afrikaners could cling longer to an inequitable system through the sheer force of self-will, or release Nelson Mandela from jail and partner with him to create a new South Africa. DeKlerk was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Mandela for that reason: his courage in saying what had to be said -- that South Africa must move toward a post-apartheid society -- was as important as Mandela's leadership once it got there. What South Africa needed to learn, the universe made sure it was going to learn; the country's only choice was how much pain was going to accompany the learning.

This moment, today, marks the end of a huge chapter in human history, carrying with it -- as does the end of every stage of growth -- the invitation to begin an even greater one. The myriad end-of-the-world scenarios filling the air today emerge from a fear-based ego's inevitable argument that if we do not go its way, then there is no way to go. But in fact, there is. There is another way to live, to be, to think, to behave -- and yes, to organize human civilization; the fact that the mind that manufactured the world we live in now cannot imagine what that would be, is certainly no sign that another way does not exist. The change from who we are right now to who we can and shall be once we have embraced this opportunity for change, represents a quantum leap forward in our spiritual as well as our political, economic, and social development.

There is a sense of interconnectedness -- among peoples and among nations -- that is sweeping the world today. It represents the next great wave of human consciousness, and the United States should be at the forefront of this wave; it should not be bringing up the rear. This wave emerges not from a particular intellectual or geographic region, but from a place in our awareness; an understanding in the brain and a state of wonder in the heart. It posits love not only as the greatest good but as the greatest power as well. If we had seen the amelioration of unnecessary human suffering as our "most vital national interest" over the last fifty years, the world today would be in a radically different and far less dangerous place.

America should not be known by the world simply for its material strength. It should be known for its goodness; for the greatness of its ideals. From Jefferson's genius imbued in the Declaration of Independence to Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves, from Kennedy's establishment of the Peace Corps to Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon, we have throughout our history -- not always to be sure, but often enough that we should not forget it -- pursued ideals that pointed humanity toward its betterment. Should American greatness become frozen in the past, no longer pursued? Should the dreaming of a more perfect state of being be trivialized? Should the effort to establish what our founders called "a new order of the ages" be turned into mere cliché by the cynicism of our new ruling elite?

This country should apologize: to our ancestors, many of whom gave their lives for an ideal of America which we have compromised at best and repudiated at worst; to other nations who have been affected by wrong choices we have made when our hearts and minds were weakened; to God, to each other and in a way to our own grandchildren. Seeing how we have failed the past, perhaps we will rededicate ourselves to the future.

Today, no less than in Lincoln's time, our country can have a "new birth of freedom," deciding anew that "government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Yet Lincoln knew well the connection between freedom and economics. He warned, "I see in the future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." More than a decade later, President Rutherford B. Hayes would lament that we had become a government "...of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations." At least he said it. Today, most politicians don't warn us of this situation so much as they promote it and protect it.

We have allowed a new aristocracy to steal a Presidential election, fight an imperialistic war, turn back years of effort at nuclear non-proliferation, nearly destroy America's moral authority in the world, pillage our natural resources -- and thus fall tragically behind the wave of humanity's uprising of consciousness at the dawn of the 21st Century.

Yet still we have everything we need -- probably for the first time in human history -- to create a planet that could work for everyone. There is a new conversation in the world – of sustainability, of deep humanitarianism, of genuine social progress– though you wouldn't know it, listening to most of our government officials today. There is new hope, though you wouldn't know it if you rely only on mainstream media for your news. And there is another way, though you would only know it if you look for it with your heart. Today, there is nothing short of a new possibility for life on earth. And America -- having in so many ways set the stage for the emergence of this possibility -- should now be its most passionate proponent. We should focus the extraordinary genius of this country on something far, far greater than the small-minded ambitions of greedy men. We should harness the extraordinary power of this country in the service of ways to wage peace, not war. And we should rededicate the future of this country not only to our own prosperity but to uplifting the human condition.

Nothing is more American than the audacity to dream big. Having historically dreamed some of humanity's most beautiful dreams, we are called upon now to dream its biggest dream yet. As our founders strove to form "a more perfect union," we can strive to form a more perfect world. That is the lesson inherent in all the challenges that face us now: that the world will change, when we do. When we consciously dedicate ourselves to creating a more loving planet, then that which is not love will fall of its own dead weight.

America will learn this. We will learn it through joy or we will learn through pain. But we will learn.

I'm going to be doing the "Fire the Grid" meditation on July 17th, and hope you'll join in. "Prayer is the medium of miracles," according to A COURSE IN MIRACLES, and this giant global meditation can amount to an extraordinarily powerful prayer for the healing of the world.

www.firethegrid.com

I'll "see" you there...

Marianne

As the boy, an honor student, a hero, lay bleeding on the floor of the Chicago Transit Authority bus, he told paramedics, "Tell my parents I love them." The bus, the school day, the whole world stops, but only for an eye blink: a headline or two. I wish the freeze-frame of collective grief could last a little longer. It can't, of course. There's a war to cover, more deaths, presidential posturing, reality TV. But one of these days, one of these deaths, we need to pause long enough for a moratorium on business as usual -- long enough, let us say, to figure out what "Blair's Law" might actually mean. Blair Holt, age 16, was killed Thursday morning, May 10, on his way to Chicago's Percy Julian High School. The killer, also a teenager, arrested a few days later, "got on the bus and just started shooting and kept shooting until he got off the bus," another student said. His intended target, a kid with whom he'd been feuding, was on the bus too, but wasn't hit. Four students were injured and Blair, who pushed a girl out of the line of fire before catching a bullet, became the 20th Chicago schoolchild to die of gun violence this school year, and the 27th in total to be murdered.

Perhaps the deeper question to ponder is how someone becomes one of "the wrong people." The law-abiding citizen may be the mythical everyman extolled by the NRA and its ilk — the more heavily armed the better — but rational people grasp that there's nothing inherent in the quality of being "law-abiding" and most of us, if not all of us, given the right emotional trigger, could cross that line, and if we cross it armed we could do terrible harm. This elementary level of awareness, and self-awareness, is missing from the inevitable booming cries from Fortress Gun Nut, in the wake of high-profile tragedies like Virginia Tech, that we could stop the next gun-toting psycho if we all walked around armed to the teeth. A couple weeks ago, for instance, Texas Gov. Rick Perry proposed the elimination of all restrictions on that state's concealed-weapon law, so buckaroos could pack heat in church or their local bar or wherever they wanted and, presumably, a college student's back-to-school supply list could include a 9mm Glock. Such shilling for the gun industry, which of course wants nothing so much as to expand its market, is unconscionable. What if they get their way and handguns become as ubiquitous as cell phones? Everyone has to have a cell phone now because there are no pay phones left; if Perry's vision prevails, what would disappear from the public sector is trust — a nightmare that would probably look a lot like present-day Baghdad. But the matter of crafting Blair's Law is larger than gun control, which has little likelihood of being any more successful than other forms of prohibition. Taxing, suing and otherwise linking the gun profiteers to the consequences of their products can help keep the industry in check and curb its expansion, but that's only a small part of what needs to be done.

Violence plays a false, unexamined role in history, myth and popular culture, always showing up disguised as a means to an end. Yeah, what a means: godlike, promising instantaneous change. In fact, violence supersedes every end. Why don't we know this yet? Or rather, how does it come to be that knowing it — the way the parent of a dead teenager suddenly knows it — affects so little, changes so little? The myth springs eternal. Aggrieved and fearful souls nurture the thought of violence as the all-at-once solution to their problems, never imagining the immense chain of consequences their actions will produce. With the same wormhole focus, small minds lead us into war. Blair's Law only has a chance to work if it addresses the context of violence and promotes — as the bill to create a U.S. Department of Peace strives to promote — a world that has outgrown it.
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Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com. © 2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

All people of good will want a good society, and racial prejudice has no place in one. But the fundamental principle of American governance, guaranteed by the First Amendment, is that we rely upon freedom -- letting people say what they say and think what they think -- as the best way to get us there. You want to get rid of prejudice? Shine the light on it. Don't send it creeping back under its rock.

You want to talk about evil -- particularly as it relates to race in America? There's a lot of it out there. The rate of incarceration of black men in this country, and the proven injustices towards them in our criminal justice system; there's an evil we should talk about. The number of black children receiving inadequate health care and education in our country; there's an evil we should talk about.

But one racially prejudiced comment -- not declaring hate or calling for violence, and even if part of a larger pattern in a man's life and career -- is not the evil we should be jumping up and down about. If anything, we should show a lot more sophistication and sense of proportion in our analysis of what matters most.

I am a Jew; I've heard anti-Semitic comments all my life. I've had vicious lies said about me in public and written about me in the national media. Did such comments affect me and cause me pain? Absolutely. Did they scar me for life? That's entirely my decision.

The women of the Rutgers basketball team, simply by their existence, say it all. All of them are beautiful. All of them are high achievers. The very fact that they exist prove Imus' comments to be stupid and absurd. I was all for shaming him publicly; healthy shame can be a positive force. I didn't mind his being suspended from his job, and I wouldn't have minded if it had been for longer. But firing him because we have to start concerning ourselves with what's "admissable" on the airwaves? Does that mean I can no longer say "lying President" or "war-mongering Vice-President" or "corrupt administration?"

I watched my Congresswoman speak on television about how this isn't the end of the conversation. Oh, really? Does that mean we'll have a real conversation now about the obscene and disgusting language spewing out of the music industry, over TV and radio, every single hour of every day? She knows as well as I do that much of that obscenity stems from black artists. And that language and those images don't just degrade one particular group of women. They degrade all women, of any color.

This situation degrades all Americans.

Marianne Williamson

radio host, "Oprah and Friends" XM156

This Spring, the book and DVD "The Secret" made a blazing appearance onto the stage of American society. From New York to Los Angeles to Denver to Detroit, and apparently in pretty much most towns in between, people scrambled to learn what any metaphysical student knows as the simple law of Cause and Effect. Thought, or consciousness, is the level of Cause; our experience in the world is the level of Effect.

"The Secret" became quite controversial, as both its weaknesses (historical inaccuracies, concentration on individual/material rather than collective/spiritual good) as well as its strengths (the revelation of a simple but very powerful truth: that what you think is what you get) sent elite guardians of the status quo up the wall. Newsweek Magazine, for one, slammed the project as "ethically deplorable" and "scientifically preposterous." While the magazine article's facts weren't necessarily off the mark, its basic cynicism made me root for "The Secret" as though it was David fighting Goliath. For one thing, I had seen people's lives change for the better because they had watched it. I suppose because its contents are the staples of my profession, I was slightly surprised it contained any new information for anyone. But I figured hey, if it did, I'm just glad they watched it.

Still, on my own path, neither Newsweek nor "The Secret" hone in on what interests me most. My thoughts are with that overweight person.

The issue spiritually is not whether you're overweight or thin; it's whether you're an instrument of love. So as I walked through an airport pondering these issues, I was thinking, "So what am I supposed to do if I see an overweight person? Look away?" That doesn't work for me, though I understand the point "The Secret's" author was making. Rather, I thought, I would want to silently bless, send love, pray for, anyone who might in any way have a problem - which means everyone, whether it shows on the outside or not. There are hundreds of years old paintings of Jesus and saints, with rays of light pouring out their hearts. That's the top of the mountain. It has nothing to do with whether you're rich or poor, overweight or skinny. It has to do with how much light you allow to pour through you with each thought.

Now, it just so happens that in the space of that light, you are directed subconsciously to whatever amounts to your highest expression. And that includes whatever might be your perfect weight, since weight influences the way the body contains the spirit. It is all very simple. Make everything about God, that is all. Which means, make everything about love. Love for the makers of "The Secret," love for the writers of the article in Newsweek, love for overweight people, love for skinny people, love for whoever you see or even think of. Keep your mind on the job of sending out love. Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven (love for everyone) and all (yes, including your perfect weight) will be added unto you.

Or so I see it. And it's no secret at all.

The life of the everyday Iraqi is the great untold story of the Iraq War. Click here for a fantastic video series, Hometown Baghdad. It will open your heart and open your mind. I hope you send it to everyone you know.

My best,

Marianne
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Problems? cut and paste this URL into your browser.
http://hometownbaghdad.com/2007/03/18/first-3-webisodes-of-hometown-baghdad/

Tribune Media Services

"Oh my gosh, I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke! And in the next instant, the thought flashed through my mind, this is so cool!"

You want a guided tour of the human brain? My guess is that you probably can't do better than "My Stroke of Insight," Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Taylor's extraordinary account of the cranial hemorrhage that shut down her left brain when she was 37 years old. But the book's value -- its preciousness -- lies less in the plain-language, enthusiastic science it offers us, than in the door it courageously opens to the mystery of the brain's right hemisphere and beyond . . . to the pulsing miracle of life and the vast universe that is our home.

Part of the joy of this book (to order, visit drjilltaylor.com) is that nothing unfolds the way you'd expect. Taylor's story at its darkest courses with gratitude and humor and, most of all, amazement, as she recounts what happened to her with Ph.D.-level clarity and awareness of detail combined with childlike exuberance. The sudden loss of her left-brain organizational and self-defining capabilities was not, for instance, terrifying. Life-threatening though her predicament was, Taylor saw her stroke as a gift of unparalleled awareness: the shattering of the self-created box we live in that we call "life."

"When the shower droplets beat into my chest like little bullets, I was harshly startled back into . . . reality," she writes of that first morning. "As I held my hands up in front of my face and wiggled my fingers, I was simultaneously perplexed and intrigued.

"Wow, what a strange and amazing thing I am. What a bizarre living being I am. Life! I am life! I am a sea of water bound inside this membranous pouch. Here, in this form, I am a conscious mind and this body is the vehicle through which I am ALIVE! I am trillions of cells sharing a common mind. I am here, now, thriving as life. Wow! What an unfathomable concept! I am cellular life, no -- I am molecular life with manual dexterity and a cognitive mind!"

Taylor's book accomplishes quite a few important things in a fairly short space. It tells a fascinating story that begins with how she orchestrated her rescue that morning even as "my earthly body dissolved and I melted into the universe," and proceeds through brain surgery and eight years of slow recovery of her left-brain functions (for instance, she had to learn to read all over again, beginning with the preschool-level "The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy"); it bursts with hope for everyone who is brain-injured (not just stroke patients but accident victims and thousands of Iraq war vets); and it gives medical practitioners clear, no-nonsense information about the shortcomings of conventional treatment and attitudes toward the brain-injured: "I needed people to come close and not be afraid of me."

But to my mind, what makes "My Stroke of Insight" not just valuable but invaluable -- a gift to every spiritual seeker and peace activist -- is what I would describe as Taylor's fearless mapping of the physiology of compassion, the physiology of Nirvana.

This book is about the wonder of being human and as such is a plea and a prayer that we strive to be equal to how big we really are. What a piece of work is man -- 5 trillion cells functioning in purposeful harmony. The two hemispheres of our brain are yoked opposites: limit-setting rationality (time, judgment, ego) in perpetual interplay with the eternal and unbounded now. Together, and only together, do these two halves of our awareness make our human destiny.

A healthy person, and a healthy society, honor and live more or less equally out of both halves of the brain. When I asked Taylor how she'd describe our current state of societal balance, she said: 85-15. "We don't just not engage the skills of the right hemisphere, we mock them!"

That is to say, we live and we strangle each other in our left-brain ego-boxes, refusing to trust or even acknowledge that a different kind of world is possible. Here's how Taylor puts it: "I realized that the blessing I had received from this experience was the knowledge that deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time. . . . My stroke of insight would be: Peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind."

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Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

© 2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

On February 3 - 5, 2007, the Peace Alliance had a fantastic conference in Washington DC, campaigning for legislation to create a US Dept. of Peace. We had a sold out crowd, with over two hundred and fifty meetings at Congressional offices. Joaquin Phoenix attended; Steven Tyler of Aerosmith performed; Deepak Chopra spoke. It was very successful and exciting.

Over two hundred US colleges and universities give advanced degrees in Peacebuilding Studies-- skills ranging from conflict resolution and non-violent communication skills to international projects in cross-cultural and interreligious healing. While there has been an explosion of this kind of expertise in the United States over the last twenty years, with proven records and best-practices techniques at violence prevention and reduction, it has no institutional platform or institutional heft within the functioning of the US government. Relatively small projects do exist within certain departments, and of course there are privately funded efforts all over the country. But with no unified platform, there is no structure to co-ordinate or synergize this wealth of talent, lifting it to anywhere near the maximal level of efficacy it could have at saving people's lives here and abroad.

We're already making inroads in DC, and there is a grassroots movement -- a new kind of peace movement, actually -- forming the basis for a social if not political constituency for the proactive cultivation of peace. Please check out www.thepeacealliance.org for ways that you can join in and make a difference. Violence is a fire that is threatening to engulf us. And we need not stand by. There is water all around....

All my best,

Marianne

On February 5th, 2007, legislation to establish a U.S. Department of Peace was re-introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives. The PeaceAlliance hosted a Conference in Washington DC from February 3-5, and the final event on Monday evening was attended by more than a thousand people from around our country and our globe.

The following article written by Robert C. Koehler was published by Tribune Media Services this morning, and describes his experiences at the Conference. If you participated in the weekend Conference, and Capitol Hill lobbying of members of Congress on Monday, know that there was no more important way to spend the day. If you were not able to join us this weekend, I hope you will join this historic citizen lobbying effort to create a U.S. Department of Peace by calling or writing your members of Congress. Please visit www.thepeacealliance.org for more details.

All my best,

Marianne

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A World That Works For Everybody

By Robert C. Koehler

Tribune Media Services

Peace is a chant, a vibration, a leap of the human spirit into the 21st century and beyond. It's also HR 808 - radical common sense crafted into a bill and introduced this week into the new Congress by Dennis Kucinich.

Let me describe for you, as best I can in this brief space, the heave of emotion this piece of legislation and the campaign to support it have set off in me the past few days. For this I thank and blame the Peace Alliance, which held a conference in D.C. over the weekend in support of the bill - well, it was half conference, fact-dense and nitty-gritty, brimming with info on bullying and suicide and war; and half revival, alive with music and global religion, full of God and Buddha and the spirit of the Founding Fathers and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Jane Addams and Susan B. Anthony and many others.

That morning, the main headline in the Washington Post read: "At Least 125 Killed in Blast at Baghdad Market." This is so clearly not a world that works for everybody, and it's so clearly getting worse. "A suicide bomber detonated more than a ton of explosives in a market in central Baghdad late Saturday afternoon. . . . 'It's like a slaughterhouse. You can see blood everywhere. It's an unbelievable sight.'"

Peace is not a lull between bomb blasts. But to envision the world that Beckwith and others at the conference invoked - to compress hope into a rending certainty that such a world is possible as well as necessary - peels away the numbness and cynicism that lets us live in this one. No wonder so few people are embracing it.

And yet that's not true at all. A yearning for peace is at everyone's core, and the recognition of our complex, planetary interdependence is hardly controversial. Peace studies and nonviolent conflict resolution - the technology of peace - are gaining prominence in universities around the world.

"There are new ideas on the world's horizon, as different from the twentieth-century worldview as the twentieth century was different from the nineteenth century," writes Marianne Williamson, founder of the Peace Alliance, in her book Healing the Soul of America. "We are ready to apply principles of healing and recovery, not just to our bodies, not just to our relationships, but to every aspect of life."

Kucinich's legislation, which calls for the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Peace, funded at 2 percent of the Defense Department's budget, is just a step in the process. It's not a fabrication out of whole cloth. It would fund and coordinate programs already in existence, in schools, prisons and elsewhere; link the concepts of domestic and international violence; and give the U.S. government access to the latest thought and research on everything from safe schools to international arms control.

Its implementation would acknowledge and further an awareness, a rationality, already taking hold. For instance: "It's a fraction of the cost to prevent a war than prosecute a war," Williamson pointed out at the conference. Somewhere in the corridors of power, a voice should be sounding, and advocating for, such common sense.

Similarly, while the state of California, Williamson noted, spends $150,000 per year per juvenile delinquent, violence-prevention programs are funded at the level of $150 per youth. It's nuts - such an allocation of resources is as foolish and wasteful and wrongheaded as a suicide bomber in the marketplace. "Nothing is so dangerous for our security," Williamson said, "as large groups of desperate people."

Yet the rationality of peace tends to just sit there - ho hum, what else is new? - while the headlines go off in our faces. Are we doomed to a violent politics, with all its news drama and illusion of instant transformation? Powerful interests, even government itself, seem locked into the mechanisms of war and human violence, however suicidal in the long, and now middle-distance, run.

The creation of a Department of Peace would by no means extricate us from our dilemma, but it would signal our collective interest in making a start. Yet the bill faces enormous obstacles just to come up for debate. In the last session of Congress, it had 74 co-sponsors; with its reintroduction, 41 legislators are so far back on board. Its advocates will need enormous passion to keep the interest in it growing.

This brings me back to that moment in the conference when a just, fair world - a world that works for everybody - flickered in my heart as more than an abstraction, and I felt myself clot with tears. Perhaps you'd cry too if you sensed how close we are to such a world, and how close we are to blowing it forever.

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

© 2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Richard Carlson, author of "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff," died on December 13th. I want to take this moment to not only acknowledge his profound contributions, but also to attest to his personal kindness. I have never met anyone who more fully embodied the principles of compassion and generosity. He enthusiastically supported the work of peace, including the work of The Peace Alliance. I considered him a true gentleman and supportive friend, and I feel inspired to be a better person for having known him.

I pray for his wife and children at this very sad time, that the peace of God will flood their hearts. Millions of people all around the world have better lives because Richard lived. May he receive now all the joy he gave....

Marianne