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The other night, my dear friend N. came over to hang out for a while. She told me that she’d been fighting a lot with her mother, a born-again Christian who watches a lot of Fox News, about politics. “What I don’t understand,” N. told me, “is the vitriol. She might disagree with Obama, or with me, but why does she have to be so hateful?”

Remembering several occasions on which N. had spewed her own venom in the opposite direction, especially during last fall’s election, I gingerly asked her how her rigid stance differed from her mother’s. “Aren’t you just as much of a fundamentalist about your beliefs as she is?”

We talked through this for the next hour or so. “They don’t believe in evolution so they want to teach theology in schools! They hang out in their little enclaves and won’t even listen to anyone who doesn’t agree with them! They won’t let up on the most asinine things!”

In each case, I saw the truth in what she was saying. And I also saw, with more clarity than ever before, that each of those statements could be applied to “our” side as well. From the religious right’s point of view, random, causeless, meaningless evolution is a form of religion—an atheistic one they don’t want their kids learning. Liberals also hang out in little enclaves, and have unwavering stances. We are all guilty of the same rigid way of thinking.

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I grew up in a very strict Catholic background, and I loved many things about my Catholic faith—the community, the music, the beauty of Christ’s teachings. But I couldn’t reconcile my growing knowledge and ideas about the world with the dogma, and so when I left home, I left my Catholic upbringing behind in favor of science-based speculation about the way the universe works. At family get-togethers, I argued with my aunts and uncles late into the night, railing against their faith’s rigidity and oppressiveness.

Of course, my rants didn’t convince anyone of anything, and in fact I experienced some great losses taking this stance. Not only did it separate me from millions of people—including much of my family!—who do gain strength and perspective from their religious faiths; I also lost my sense of a Great Story I could believe in and learn from. If, as much of science tells us, we ended up here by accident, and our being here doesn’t particularly mean anything, then why even bother getting out of bed in the morning?

This story is pretty common, I think, and I know that lots of us feel the loss of a higher perspective. The proof is in our culture (insert your favorite example about how shallow we’ve become here).

But what if, instead of setting ourselves against each other, we could instead see from a higher perspective that makes it possible to embrace and integrate both religious and scientific revelations?

That’s the task to which Reverend Michael Dowd has dedicated his life. I’m currently reading his book “Thank God for Evolution” and it is truly awesome. In this interview, he explains how he got started in Evolutionary Evangelism and why every new fact science learns is good news. The interview gets really juicy right at the end; I wish they could have continued ...

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I just knew it – it had to happen sooner or later. My hero, B.O., just appointed Tom Vilsack—an outspoken proponent of big agro business and bio-engineering—to Secretary for Agriculture. Help! The lobbying in Washington to prevent him from getting into office is already under way, and 20,000 signatures have been sent directly to the transition team. Yet, in the midst of it all I can just recognize, in the more lucid neurons of my liberal environmentalist brain, the ‘us and them’ mentality we were all lamenting so much before and during the election creeping in again—the divided America.

And there is more. Another e-mail alarm reached my inbox: “The road-building lobby is trying to convince the incoming administration that building roads should be part of the stimulus package that gets the economy back on track”… So those guys are at it again as well……

Reading all this I feel like I am breathing again the acidic atmosphere of righteous activism versus the corrupt establishment while at the same time knowing perfectly well that there really are forces and powers out there whose only interest is to maintain just that, power.

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This is the second of 2 parts of Jessica Roemischer’s interview with Spiral Dynamics wizard Don Beck. Read part one.

Jessica Roemischer: Which candidate do you think is best suited to institute this new trans-partisan approach to governance—Obama or McCain?

Don Beck: I think both candidates have strengths in this regard. But after eight years, the “out party”—the Democrats—are in a much better position to do this because the “in party” is exhausted. When you look at the people Bush has had in important roles, you can see that a party that maintains power for eight years runs out of steam. I think there’s a freshness in the Obama camp and a lot of popular support for him with high levels of energy. I think he’s more equipped to do something like what I’m describing. Certainly Obama’s background also suggests that to us.

Yet, much can be said for McCain—his courage, strength and resolve. He probably has the ability to deal with foreign affairs much better than Obama does. But there are elements to his right which concern me—for example, the element behind so much of the warfare. Similarly, to Obama’s left, that hard liberal system is destructive for us because it won’t institute the kind of policies that are necessary for most of the population. I’m worried about extremity on both sides of them.

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Jessica’s interview with Spiral Dynamics wizard Don Beck continues the conversation on integral views of sticky subjects that Uli started yesterday. Understanding and including all points of view can be difficult when the air is charged with so many polarized views as it is in this election season. My own feelings lead me toward the far-left viewpoints I’ve always espoused, while my intention leads me toward a more integral view, so I’m grateful for Dr. Beck’s perspective as it gives me a framework to understand and choose my reactions.

Jessica is doing wonderful work to awaken through music the transformative power of beauty in each of us and to bring integral perspectives into view. I’m grateful for the opportunity to include her voice on The Sunny Way, as her work embodies exactly what we are trying to create—a new way of living and relating with each other that reaches into and elicits the best parts of what it means to be human. -ed.

As I’ve watched the presidential campaign unfold in my living room, I’ve become increasingly unsettled by the cultural schism it’s revealing. Robo-calls from John McCain, caustic opinion pieces on Sarah Palin (often by women), FOX news, MSNBC, negative campaigning—Left and Right. In this highly charged atmosphere, it’s been difficult to make sense of things. I’ve even questioned my longstanding allegiance to the Democratic Party, which has made it challenging to find common ground with friends I’ve known for years. In search of a different perspective on the election, I was compelled to seek out global activist, Dr. Don E. Beck, whom I interviewed in 2002 for What is Enlightenment? Magazine (now EnlightenNext magazine).

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Uli’s piece on deepening her long-held beliefs around abortion is a powerful example of what we can discover about ourselves and about Life with a big L when we go beyond simple polarizations like left and right and really look deeply into our experiences and motivations. I believe this kind of self-evaluation and opening to opposite points of view is exactly what we need to do to move beyond the Culture War. Uli, thank you for bravely sharing your integral thoughts on this very divisive subject. -ed.

We have been contemplating the culture war here on The Sunny Way for a while now. During these elections, Sarah Palin and all, it is highlighted even more. So I wanted to pick up the thread.

In thinking about this article it soon became clear that it is impossible to cover the breadth of this topic in a single blog-length piece and how important it was to speak about this together. So this is a starting point for a discussion that will hopefully take us into new territory, beyond the current frozen frontiers….

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Ever since I first attended a local meeting of the Obama campaign I have been continually struck by what I encounter in this movement: For one, an intense focus - everyone, you can tell, is barely sleeping and overwhelmed by how much there is to do, but determined to use this opportunity for change. I wake up in the mornings with their tired faces in front of my eyes. Seeing the people and the way this grassroots campaign is being run both up and down the hierarchical ladder I really get that Obama indeed does mean this: Change. Not just the word, but the thing itself.

When the man in charge of the campaign for Massachusetts introduced himself at that meeting he spoke respectfully and humbly about wanting to make the effort to infuse what he had observed in Obama on the trail with him—his clarity, openness and ability to listen and think in ways that do not divide—into his work with us, the volunteers.

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Ecotism spotted in Arcata, CA

I first came across the term ecotism in a blog by a tea connossieur talking about an eco-friendly ice cream shop in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. “Blue Marble is a ‘green’ ice-cream company, and not shy about touting that,” she writes. “While I agree with those principles, the overall feel of the shop and its customers are almost unbearably ecotistical.”

Now, I haven’t been to the ice cream shop in question, but I did check out their website, and while it seems to me that the shop is proud of the sustainability of its products, it doesn’t strike me as overly smug. I wondered, what exactly about this ice cream shop got under the blogger’s skin?

Is it the price of the organic, locally produced ice cream ($3.50 for one scoop)? Is she such a cynical New Yorker that she figures any ‘green’ marketing must be BS? Or does she just not like people tooting their own horns in any fashion?

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Following links around the web lately, I’ve been finding more and more posts about how, if we want to succeed at creating an awesome future for everyone, we absolutely must bridge the cultural gap between the political left and the right in the US.

Of course, I couldn’t agree more: the Culture War is the biggest roadblock in the process of solving problems in a holistic and sensible way. So it gives makes me very happy to hear so many bloggers talking about this issue from so many different points of view.

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Election season is in full swing, and I’m hearing more heated political conversations every day. Consequently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ideas we discussed earlier this year in Sitting out the Culture War—namely, how much we share as human beings living in the year 2008 on Planet Earth, and how we can focus on our shared humanity when the political fur starts flying.

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A few weeks ago, I attended a new play called “Current Changes in Empire” by Sarah Moon of the NYLovesMountains project, which is working to establish connections between communities which are being impacted by mountaintop removal (MTR) coal-mining, and the cities (like New York) which get their power from that coal.

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A couple of nights ago, Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute gave a talk close by in North Adams, Mass. It was entitled “Winning the Oil End-Game,” as is a book he co-authored which is available free for download.

I wasn’t sure what to expect other than hearing some kind of icon of innovative environmental thinking. I am probably a dinosaur to not have heard of him before, but I was astounded by what he shared in his talk. Within the space of an hour and a half, he laid out a comprehensive plan for the US to leave behind its addiction to oil quickly and easily and, in the process, create a cleaner environment and very healthy economic growth.

What was most astounding was that this wasn’t a great plan of possibility—he had figures and proven technologies to back it all up, and in fact is already working with the Pentagon and Walmart and whoever else is willing to embrace his solutions. (Here I swallowed hard at first, more about that further down). “I don’t deal in problems, I deal in solutions,” is one of his favorite mottos, and it wasn’t until after the talk that I realized how very profound and still relatively rare this attitude is in circles concerned with the restructuring of our economy or climate change. Especially for this attitude to not just be positive words, but in perfectly documented ways of action. He presented so many of these, and so many figures, that I won’t even try to repeat them here. You can see a very condensed and quite overwhelming 19 minute clip here.

Walking out of this talk, I realized how deeply (both consciously and unconsciously) our thinking about the future of the planet is rooted in dread and fear, and the sense that there is a very big problem (with us humans anyways). All that actually evaporated listening to him. And that is quite outrageous. He seemed to embody the best of the bright green movement.

Of course what he is proposing is not going to be perfect and no doubt will create its own problems in time as development always does, but it sure looks like a brilliant, do-able and all around uplifting avenue of action. His ending quote (by Marshall McLuhan) was this: Only small secrets need protection; big secrets are protected by the public’s incredulity.

As far as the Pentagon sponsoring his book—it certainly rubbed up against my own ideas of who and what is good and who and what is (very) bad. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me that traditional values like those held in the military, combined with holistic forward thinking as done by the Rocky Mountain Institute, could be just the recipe to get things done. As Spiral Dynamics Wizard Don Beck said when he spoke about the paralysis in our postmodern, pluralistic and individualistic (green meme) culture – if green doesn’t want to change, blue (authoritarian) and yellow (integral thinking) will get together, and form a new green!

And this sense of real potential and progress didn’t at all have the effect of breathing a sigh of relief and wanting to lay back. Rather it made me ask What’s next? and left me wanting to engage much more.

Earth Day 2008 started out promisingly enough. I sit on the recycling committee at the giant corporation I work for (of course I do!), and we arranged to get some sweet freebie travel mugs to give to our colleagues, to encourage them to use fewer paper cups in the office.

We set up a table outside the cafeteria and handed out about a thousand of them, and people were jazzed. What a great idea! we heard over and over again. By the time lunch was over, we were almost out of mugs, and patting ourselves on the back.

We also set up a screening of The 11th Hour, which I hadn’t seen at that point. And, flying high from the talk I’d given the previous week which had ended with a truly wonderful conversation, I’d volunteered to facilitate a discussion after the screening. The CEO’s office even kicked in some free soda and popcorn for attendees. We were pumped for another great event.

So ... 5 pm. Screening time. About 15 people showed up, less than half the number that had RSVPed, but that’s to be expected. No biggie. I warmly welcomed everyone and invited them to stay afterwards to talk about the film, then we settled into our seats and the lights went down.

An hour into the film, I was wondering what we’d gotten ourselves into. The first 2/3 of this movie are seriously depressing. How was I going to put a Sunny Way spin on 60 relentless minutes of how screwed we are?

The last 30 minutes throw the viewer a small bone of hope, but seriously? The proportions are all wrong. Leonardo DiCaprio and friends go into a lot of detail on the problems, but just sort of breeze through the solutions, almost as though they are an afterthought.

I suppose I should have been grateful the doom-and-gloom hour came first! Imagine the mood in the room if they’d ended with the falling sky stuff. We would have had to hand out cyanide instead of popcorn.

Anyway. The film ended with a rousing Coldplay tune, the credits rolled, and the lights went up. Discussion time. Things started out innocuously enough: What did you like about this film?

One nice man, the leader of our recycling committee, said he liked the feeling of optimism and possibility at the end. I nodded enthusiastically. Yes, I said. It’s important to stay positive, because who does anything when they feel overwhelmed and depressed? Others in the group murmured their agreement. It’s up to all of us.

At that point, another gentleman jumped in with a torrent of sentences. They should have done a lot more about cars, America was built on the automobile and it was great, at least until unions ruined it. I blinked a few times, then buckled down to talk a bit with him about all that. Pretty soon I was on the history of transportation in the U.S. and he was on how everything comes down to no one disciplining their children anymore.

Twenty minutes or so later, I was not at all sure what was happening, but I knew it was not the positive, proactive conversation I’d been hoping for.

Then, another man got up to leave. He hadn’t said a word, but he stopped by my chair, looked me in the eye, and told me, “I really appreciate you doing this. I have to say, though, I think it’s too late. We don’t have a prayer.”

Stunned, confused, and frustrated, I turned to him and said, “All due respect and everything, sir? That is a cop-out.” His resigned expression didn’t change. He simply shrugged and walked out.

Another guy nodded in agreement with him. So did my union-busting, car-loving, red-blooded American debate partner. I could feel my color rising, so I wrapped things up, thanked everyone for coming, and bolted.

On the subway home, I broke down in tears. How can people be so closed-minded? I wrote wildly in my journal. So deaf to anything other than the sound of their own voices? How are we ever going to get anywhere?

And at that moment, the enormity of the situation rose up before me like a massive concrete wall, so high I couldn’t see the top, so smooth and monolithic I couldn’t see a way to climb it.

Now before you start wondering about my mental health, let me make sure I am clear on this: I am not kidding about what it says at the top of this web page. I am dedicated to this cause with every cell in my body and every thought in my head. This project—creating a context of possibility, encouraging everyone to take part, making responsibility the rule rather than the exception—is the purpose of my life. And it’s not like I think it’s going to be easy. I know the task before us is HUGE.

But we all live in the bubble of our own experience, and my experience is usually filled with people who think a lot like I do. Yours probably is, too. Birds of a feather and all that. Reaching out to a new flock is something most of us don’t do very often. I suppose I shouldn’t expect my first time to be perfect, but I was disappointed in myself all the same. Bitterly disappointed.

Talking with a friend later that night, I got a bit of perspective. Of course we’re going to run into obstacles! Of course people see things differently! That’s why this project is so important—because right now our differences are keeping us from actively working on solutions.

Another truth: these people had stayed at work for 2 hours past quitting time to watch and discuss a movie about the environment. It’s more than possible that the level of their cynicism is exactly equal to the level of their care. Transform that cynicism into action and half our battle is won.

And, finally, on a personal note, recognizing one’s own limitations is the first step in learning how to transcend them. To break through a wall, you kinda have to hit it first. Failure holds more lessons than success.

So, now, several days later, I can see the gifts in this breakdown. My less-than-stellar performance showed me that if I really want to fulfill my mission, I have to grow. We all do. If we want to create something new, we have to let go of what we think we know. That beautiful, elegant future we dream of? It lies outside the borders of the easy and the familiar. It is a brand new place whose gates won’t swing open to us until we learn to see and create in brand new ways.

The question is: Can we lay down everything we think we are sure of and travel to that unknown land together? Are we willing to try and fail and try again?

I am, and I hope you are, too. Stay tuned.

My fate as a future “liberal coastal elite” was sealed at age 15, when I sat down at my family’s dinner table and proudly declared that I was going to work for Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign. My normal, Catholic, conservative parents reacted the way they always did when I said something wackily reminiscent of the 60s philosophies they’d grown up with but never espoused: my dad rolled his eyes, and my stepmom ignored me.

Not surprisingly, I left my hometown for college as fast as I could and pretty much never went back. I lived in big cities, fronted a band, worked for Ralph Nader, stopped eating meat. You know the type. And I’m the only one in my family who chose this kind of track. Home isn’t home to me anymore, and hasn’t been for a while. Over the years, my ideas changed to the point where it has become difficult for me to understand many members of my family at all, and I’m sure they think I’m an alien, too.

Where I see fascinating diversity, they see frightening differences. Small-town family-oriented life bores me to even think about, let alone live, but provides them nourishment and security. And, most divisively, where they see “fair and balanced” news coverage, I see a pile of bullshit so large and offensive it can probably be seen and smelled from space.

Clearly, these members of my family and I see the world through markedly different lenses. At this point, when we do talk (which isn’t often), it’s mostly about movies and TV shows, and even in that shallow arena, our opinions still differ. We don’t have much common ground left, even though we grew up together, running the same streets, sledding the same backyard tracks. Somewhere along the line, our ideas about the world we grew up in diverged, and we stayed up late on Thanksgivings and summer vacations fighting bitterly about religion and poverty and justice. Then as adults, we shied away from conversation for so long that we barely know each other anymore.

Now, here we are on opposite sides of a thick glass wall, regarding each other with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion. We, my family and I and most of America, in fact, are victims of the culture war, shell-shocked and deaf from listening to each other’s screaming.

What is the culture war and what does it have to do with the environment?

The American culture war is a 50-year-long death match still being fought between the opposite ends of the political spectrum. In one corner we have the people who believe that history books and TV news shows are basically telling the truth, and in the other are those who believe that rich white men have run the world for too long. Each side regards the other as the worst possible type of person, hell-bent on destroying America and lacking any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Both sides are guilty of fouling the personal and political environment in our country.

Ironically, the polarization between left and right brings out the worst stereotypical behavior in both groups. Liberal city-dwellers make condescending jokes about people who actually believe the Bible, while conservative suburbanites mock environmentalists for being wussies who won’t eat meat. None of it is pretty. More importantly, all of it is destructive.

I realize I’m speaking in huge generalizations here, and that most people lie somewhere between the extremes of traditional conservative and postmodern liberal. Which makes it even more galling that our country’s political conversations are set at such a shrill, divisive level. Especially when we have so many urgent problems to solve.

The sniping between left and right prevents us from having new and meaningful conversations about how to create a cleaner and more vibrant future. Fighting about age-old arguments is just another way to spin our wheels in the familiar. And as long as we stay stuck in this pattern, any sort of real change is impossible.

Listening instead of fighting

The question at this point is, how can reasonable people get beyond this rhetorical bloodletting? How can we quit fighting this unwinnable war?

For me, the first step is to come straight out and admit that, for all my self-righteousness, I am as confused as anyone. I work for a big corporation and also for a food co-op. I disdain Wal-Mart for its heartless, big-box tactics, but I still, inexplicably, love Target. The advances of Western society have made my privileged existence possible, and yet that very privileged heart also holds deep cynicism toward those achievements and the motives behind them.

From my vantage point inside postmodern liberalism, I am fully willing to admit that it is a mixed bag. For all the good things in it, like feminism, the Civil Rights movement, and rock’n'roll, it also holds a lot of messed up families, broken-down communities, and an insidious moral relativism that has disintegrated our sense of purpose on Earth.

Similarly, I know that many people with traditional morals are also held back by the limitations of what the culture war says conservatism is. Does believing in family and tradition mean it’s necessary to buy the whole Fox News, environmentalists-are-terrorists, homosexuals-want-to-make-us-all-gay package?

On both sides of the equation, it’s a conundrum to be sure. Both points of view have valid points and both are also full of crap. Neither side has a monopoly on The Truth. So why do we feel the need to pledge allegiance to one and fight the other to the death? A better option is to use the brains God (or whoever) gave us to cherry-pick the best parts of each, carry those into the future, and leave both the bitterness and the bad ideas behind.

For example, traditional values include a lot of useful things, like how to raise strong kids who know right from wrong, the value of community, and the power of pulling together toward a common goal.

And postmodernism includes some fine stuff, too: honoring the richness of diversity, respecting individuals’ personal perspectives, and expanding one’s circle of care to include the entire world.

These all seem like good, practical values, don’t they? Put them all together and it sounds to me like a viable recipe for tackling problems and designing solutions that serve the needs of lots of different kinds of people.

And this is exactly my hope, my call to action. I am laying down my arms in the culture war, and I want you to do the same. If we are successful, maybe we can harvest the wealth of all our different worldviews and come up with a new one that ties them all together. Maybe not. But we will never know unless we stop the sniping and give ourselves a chance to connect on a higher, more human level.

So, I hereby promise to stop the snark and start really listening to people who have different ideas, especially if I don’t agree with them. In this way, I hope in my own small way to rebuild the bridges that liberals and conservatives have stupidly blown up in this useless, protracted struggle, so we can work together and fix the mess we’ve made.

Will you join me in this effort?

Over the coming months, I will report back from the front lines of sitting out the culture war. Please write and let us know how your make-like-Switzerland action is going, too.