Author: Neale Donald Walsch

Here’s the situation regarding Ukraine: Everyone is “right.”

Really.

From their own point of view, everyone is “right.”

Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych is right. Acting president Oleksandr Turchynov is right. Russian President Vladimir Putin is right. U.S. President Barack Obama is right. The Ukraine parliament in Kiev is right in claiming that the election in Crimea to determine whether that area of Ukraine will secede and join the Russian Federation is illegal under the country’s constitution. The parliament in the Crimean Peninsula is right in calling for the election and declaring that the people there should have the ability of self-determination.

Everybody is “right.”

How can that be?

It’s simple. As Conversations with God tells us: “Nobody does anything inappropriate, given their model of the world.”

Mr. Yanukovych absolutely believes he was forced to leave the country by an unruly, out-of-control, threatening mob of “fascist” ultra-nationalists. Mr. Turchynov absolutely believes that this “mob” was comprised of citizens of Ukraine exercising their right to protest, and that the Parliament of Ukraine was right to vote to remove Mr. Yanukovych from the office of the presidency after he fled the country, appoint a caretaker president, and move forward with the forming of a new government.

Mr. Putin absolutely believes he is right in doing what he can to protect the Russian majority in the Crimean Peninsula, who he claimed said they feared that the same kind of mob that forced Yanukovych out of office in Kiev would take over Crimea as well, and route the Russian speaking majority there. Mr. Obama absolutely believes he is right is telling Mr. Putin that Russia is, in effect, invading the sovereign territory of Ukraine, that the Russian citizens there are under no threat from anyone, and that international sanctions against Russia are going to have to be imposed if Russia does not move its troops out of Crimea.

Everybody is absolutely right from their point of view.

What, then, to do?

We have been saying in these from the beginning of this online newspaper’s publication that the problem in the world today is not a political problem, it is not a financial problem, and it is not a military problem. The problem in the world today is a spiritual a problem, and it can only be solved by spiritual means.

What has to happen in Ukraine is that all of the leaders, all of the human beings who are deeply involved in what is occurring there, are going to have to ask themselves a simple (yet remarkable for its simplicity) question: Can we all find a way to be ‘right’ without hurting each other?

It is seem that a civilization which declares itself to be “evolved” would be able to answer that question in the affirmative. Our civilization, however, has not so far been able to figure out a way to do that. We hurt each other. We kill each other. We use “force” — because we apparently know no other way to resolve our differences.

And so, on it goes — our Crisis Civilization moving from one flare-up to another, from one conflict to another, from one killing field to another.

Can we avoid more killing in Ukraine? Can we find a way for everyone to be “right” without hurting each other?

What proposals would you lay on the table if you were a global leader right now? Please offer your ideas below.

In a spiritually evolved society, should Freedom not be the highest value? Should people not be able to do exactly and precisely what they wish?

Conversations with God says that Freedom is the highest form of Divinity. Indeed, it is one definition of Divinity Itself. Should this not mean, then, that in a spiritually alive and awake and aware community of souls, business owners ought to be able to serve — and refuse to serve — anyone they wish?

Government coercion of individual action is only necessary in an un-evolved society, and is a demonstration of the inability of that society’s members to govern themselves. The question is: Is government coercion of individual action appropriate?

Conversations with God tells us that in the highly evolved societies of sentient beings which exist in the Cosmos, there are no laws at all.

And yes, CWG tells us, there are such societies, and there are such beings, in the Universe. They simply do not exist on Earth. And so on Earth we have to pass laws that say that a person who owns a business has a perfect right to refuse to do business with anyone, for any reason whatsoever. In a free society, the sponsors of such laws assert, individuals should not have to forfeit their right to basic freedoms of choice and action simply by creating, opening, and, incidentally, funding a business. Not having to forfeit that right is what liberty means.

And entire societies — which are nothing more than bunches of individuals clumped together — have a corollary right to exercise their liberty to live as they wish, based on their mutual agreements, these folks assert. Therefore, nations that wish to make homosexuality a crime punishable by life imprisonment have a perfect right to do so, as long as the majority of the members of that society consent.

That should end all the hoo-hah over laws recently passed in Arizona (although vetoed by the governor there) and in Uganda. At least among the spiritually aware, the discussion is over.

Or is it?

What about when the majority of the members within a society consent to laws that impinge upon the freedom of individuals within that society?

That is, what about when the majority of the members within a society act in a way that is wrong? For that matter, what about when individuals choose to do things that hurt or damage the society? What about when individuals act in a way that is wrong? Does Freedom equal the “right” to be “wrong”?

What is “wrong,” anyway? Conversations with God says there is no such thing as Right and Wrong. It says there is only what works and what does not work, given what it is we are trying to do. That includes, presumably, “we” as individuals and “we” as a society. Yet what if “we” can’t agree on what it is “we” are trying to do?

It is “wrong” to drive 97 miles an hour on the way downtown? Well, that depends on whether what you are trying to do is buy a pair of new shoes at a department store, or buy some time on the way to the hospital as a woman in the passenger seat is giving birth.

Society has decided that “right” and “wrong” are contextual. That is, it all depends on the circumstances. In Florida it is perfectly okay to kill someone on the basis of your fear (real or imagined) that your life or personal safety is being threatened. You have a right to “stand your ground.” People there are soon going to be deciding whether this means you can pull out a gun and kill someone because he threw popcorn in your face during an argument in a movie theatre.

So, it is “right” or is it “wrong” if you are the owner of a business that serves the public to deny service to a member of that public simply because you choose to? Can a hotel owner refuse to rent a room to a person because of the color of his skin? Can a grocery store owner refuse to sell food to a person because she is gay? Should basic freedom allow people who own, and built up, a business the right to engage in that business with anyone they choose…and to refuse to do business with anyone they choose?

What if you are the owner of the last gas station before the desert in Arizona? Or of a diner in Alabama?

In the United States, the majority of the members of society have decided that no, you may not discriminate against customers simply because of their race or their gender. But what about their sexual orientation? What if their sexual orientation — and the behavior that proceeds from it — violates your most fundamental religious beliefs? Must you support their behavior and violate your own beliefs to protect their freedom? What about your freedom?

In Uganda, the majority of the members of society have decided that if two persons of the same gender hold hands and kiss in public, they may be sent to jail for life. People living there want the freedom to eliminate such behavior from their society, claiming that it damages the family and undermines the society itself. But what about the freedom of individuals who want to hold hands or offer a kiss to a person of the same gender?

Just what does “freedom” mean? Does it mean we have the right to act in any way we wish — as individuals or as a society — no matter who it may affect in a way with which they do not agree?

This is the great philosophical question that individuals and societies have been struggling to answer for thousands of years. The question, at its basis, comes down to this: If there is none, is it okay to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre? Is this not freedom of speech? Or must there be some controls on our exercise of freedom?

We have decided in human society (in most places and nations, at least) that the answer is yes. We have decided that actions are not acceptable under the banner of freedom if they are detrimental to the health, safety, and welfare of other people.

Would the law passed by the legislature in Arizona, which would have permitted business owners to discriminate against anyone they wished by not serving anyone they chose, based on religious beliefs, have been detrimental to the health, safety, and welfare of other people had it not been vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer, but been allowed to stand?

Is the law passed by the parliament in Uganda allowing the government to send homosexuals to prison for life detrimental to the health, safety, and welfare of other people?

What spiritual “rule of thumb” applies here? Let’s have a discussion. Your views are invited below.

Noticing that its application is “inconsistent and unequal,” Jay Inslee has decided to oppose the death penalty.

Mr. Inslee is not the first person to come to this conclusion. Indeed, people have been pointing this out for many years. He is also not the first person to decide that he opposes the death penalty because of it. But he is the first person to come to this conclusion and to reach this decision who happens to be the governor of one of the United States.

As a result, that State — Washington — has, effective February 11, stopped using its governing authority to kill people in an execution chamber…at least for the next three years. By executive order, Mr. Inslee has imposed a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty as long as he is in office. His current term expires in 1016.

Why would anybody in the United States — particularly anybody in a position of political power whose ability to hold onto that power depends upon the approval of voters — oppose the death penalty, which has been an American institution for so many years?

“There are too many flaws in the system,” Mr. Inslee is quoted in media reports as saying, adding that when the ultimate decision is death “there is too much at stake to accept an imperfect system.”

Um….uh….do you think?

The mystery is not why one courageous person would risk his political future by doing what is obviously right — but why every governor in the nation is not doing the same thing.

The State of Texas, for instance, reportedly leads the nation in putting people to death — and by some accounts and appearances the largest number of that state’s residents seem to be proud of that. “Texas justice,” some have been known to call it.

Yet not only justice, but “equal justice under the law” is the primary responsibility of any government, Washington’s governor asserts, then adds that in death penalty cases he is “not convinced equal justice is being served.”

Mr. Inslee is quoted in press accounts as observing that the use of the death penalty in his state has been so unequally applied that it was even “sometimes dependent on the budget of the county where the crime occurred.”

That kind of disparity is, of course, unconscionable, and Mr. Inslee has realized this. Fortunately, there is no other state in America where the death penalty is or has ever been unequally applied.

Um….well….maybe it has…but just once in a while, just now and then…so what does it matter? Well, it doesn’t seem to matter, as few governors or state legislatures in the United States have done what Mr. Inslee has just done, which is to simply announce: that’s enough. No more state-sponsored killing on my watch.

While 32 states in the U.S. still authorize the death penalty, Maryland became the most recent state, prior to Washington, to end executions when it repealed its death penalty law outright in 2013.

Two years earlier Gov. John Kitzhaber put a moratorium on all executions in Oregon. And eight years prior to that, in 2003, Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted all death penalties to life sentences.

But, as noted above, many states in America still kill people as a means of punishment — and they do not always do it mercifully.

Much news was made just a few weeks ago when the State of Ohio was widely accused of having badly botched the execution of a man convicted of murder named Dennis McGuire by using a lethal injection made up of a combination of chemicals that had never been tried before.

According to one journalist who witnessed the execution, the condemned man “struggled, made guttural noises, gasped for air and choked” before succumbing to a new, two-drug execution method.

In an online story about the execution, the Guardian newspaper news article said “Eyewitnesses in the death chamber reported that it took up to 26 minutes for McGuire to die, making it the longest execution in Ohio in modern times.“

The Guardian story went on to say that “the prisoner was seen to be gasping for air for up to 14 minutes in a procedure that one observer, Lawrence Hummer, described in the Guardian as horrendous and inhumane.”

Some medical experts had warned the state that the “death cocktail” would cause slow oxygen starvation, resulting in not just death for the criminal, but prolonged suffering, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment.

The state refused to listen to those opinions, or to the appeal of the criminal to at least postpone the execution until the injection had been tried on animals. It went ahead with the procedure, and the result, as described above, made headlines around the world.

At least one family member of the person the criminal had murdered appeared by press accounts to be not particularly concerned with reports of Mr. McGuire’s alleged suffering, reportedly saying to the media that the person Mr. McGuire was convicted of killing was also not spared suffering.

The spiritual question raised by all of this, of course, is whether the highest or grandest spiritual value to which humanity can aspire in cases such as this is “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

Billions of humans embrace this notion of justice — many, if not most, of them declaring that it is a concise articulation of God’s Law. God, these believers declare, imposes just this kind of justice on all human beings at the moment of their death.

In your belief system, is this true? And where do you stand on the death penalty, regardless of what you believe about God?

So it has come to this.

More and more schools across the country are now apparently involving children in so-called Active Intruder Drills.

Complete with armed police bursting into darkened classrooms to “rescue” endangered children, the firing of blanks by fake “intruders” using real runs, and realistic enactments that in one case actually frightened students, these drills may soon become part of The New American Scene in classrooms from sea to shining sea.

So we are told in a remarkable news story revealing this latest educational development published February 8 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a column by writer Aisha Sultan headlined: Hiding in the hallways: Intruder drills get graphic

In the story, Ms. Sultan describes how some schools involve members of the high school drama club who don gruesome make-up — complete with fake blood running down faces from make-believe bullet holes in students’ temples — and then play out an entire scene, giving school officials, teachers, and first responders “a chance to practice what would happen in such a worst-case scenario.” Except for the voluntary actors, other students are not involved in such drills.

But, Ms. Sultan wrote in her Parents Talk Back column, not all such drills involve only adults.  “Masked ‘intruders,’ armed with guns, fired blanks at a group of teachers in a library in a rural Oregon school last year,” her article reported. Further, she reports, a student at Central York High School in New Jersey wrote about the deafening noise when those armed police officers burst into her dark classroom to “rescue” the students during a realistic active intruder drill.

And yes, it allegedly happened that, according to Ms. Sultan’s report, “an El Paso, Texas district took it a step further with a surprise intruder drill so realistic that students sent panicked texts to parents.”

The purpose of the drills is to potentially save lives by reducing panic in the case of an actual on-site intruder attack at a school, Ms. Sultan makes clear, just as schools for decades have run fire drills, tornado and earthquake drills — and even, in the 50s, air raid drills and atomic bomb drills.

But the possibility of an intruder coming right into a classroom and killing students in could blood adds a new dimension to the model of the world with which a child grows up, one would have to conclude.

Or, as Aisha Sultan wrote: “When you have to imagine yourself getting shot, your teacher hiding you, year after year since you were five years old, that creates some sort of impression. When a threat is so real that you can hear screams and shots fired and smell sweat during the trial runs, that changes a child’s perception of what places are safe,” even though, she continued, “schools remain one of the safest places for children.”

Yes, but does the world feel safe to children who grow up made, in realistic invader drills, to line up against a wall where no one can see them so that their classroom looks empty? When they watch as their teacher quickly rolls down paper on all the windows? When they are told to not make a sound until they hear “all clear?”

“So the defense we’ve given our children since massacres at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook is very often: Turn off the lights, stay quiet, and hide,” Ms. Sultan opines. “That’s certainly easier than trying to make even the smallest reforms to the country’s gun laws.”

Changes such as restrictions on the purchase of assault weapons or even reasonable  requirements for background checks for gun buyers are supported by “the vast majority of Americans,” the writer asserts, but such modest gun control measures cannot survive any legislative process “because of the power of the gun lobby,” she alleges.

Meanwhile school security “is an industry now,” she wrote in her column, “with trainers and equipment and realistic drills meant to convince us that teaching children to dodge bullets at school is somehow a normal part of growing up.”