How the Justice System has excluded input from the people

Last time I was called for jury duty in Delaware there were 42 cases scheduled. We figured we were just unlucky, and we’d surely be called for a jury with so many cases, despite all the tales we’d heard about people getting out of the courthouse by noon. But indeed we were out by noon. Only one case went to a jury. That means 41 people pleaded guilty to something that day, either a crime they’d committed, or a crime they felt was the least they would get away with given the system and the warnings from their defense attorney, the only person who might be expected to be on their side, that coming before a jury would be a crapshoot.

If over 90% of cases are decided by attorneys, prosecuting and defense attorneys together, we are no longer looking at an adversarial system. The only adversarial part of the system is that of the accusation versus the accused. Both prosecutor and defense have accepted the prevailing wisdom that everyone is guilty of something, the system must be preserved or total chaos will result, and therefore their roles have reverted to  highballing the punishment (prosecutor) and lowballing the punishment (defense). The prosecutor is building his or her reputation, the defense is trying not to be swamped amidst a case burden that might have applied to a whole law firm of defense lawyers in a previous time.

Nobody takes time to discover if the facts presented are true, hardly anybody even thinks about if the accused had criminal intent when he did what he was accused of. The police and prosecutor pile on enough charges to ensure that something will stick. The accused is bulldozed into pleading guilty to something so as to avoid a bigger charge. Sometime she did something criminal, sometimes she didn’t. Either way, once arrested the chances of being declared innocent are remote, and require much more money than a typical defendant is going to have.

Preserving the system is already a lost cause. The only thing attorneys are preserving at this point is their jobs. The man in the street thinks of TV shows when he thinks of the justice system, believing juries decide cases based on impassioned pleas from defense attorneys, that lack of evidence will be sufficient to free the innocent. This isn’t a part of the current system.

The first exposure to the system comes in meeting the police. Police are so overwhelmed and cynical about  whole communities that they see their job as being to preserve order, not to bring justice. Therefore when they say “If there is anymore disturbance, someone is going to be arrested” they really mean that. It really is fairly random who gets to go into the system and lose the next decade of their life to court appearances, jail time, probation, supervision, fines, etc. Add on to that reality the fact that police are often given quotas, or offered rewards to make more arrests, and sooner or later no one wants to call the police in the first place. Antonio LeGrier could tell us that, having watched his son (and an innocent neighbor) be gunned down by the Chicago police he called to help calm his son during an argument last December.

There is no point now to try to go back to the past. We have to move forward. A very helpful  first step would be to require the prosecution to prove criminal intent before someone can pay for a crime. Second, given the almost complete responsibility and control placed in the hands of attorneys today, who negotiate sentences without any jury oversight, we must surely demand that such attorneys be well qualified to make decisions concerning human motivations. Legally trained professionals cannot be expected to make decisions concerning criminal intent without further training in behavior and personality theories when they are the only  professional making decisions about people’s lives, and when they have a conflict of interest, their careers often being enhanced by gaining guilty pleas.

Given the overwhelming case burden of attorneys in the system today, this part may be facilitated by a third party involvement, not necessarily a trained psychologist, but a person trained specifically for this position. In the past guilt of motivation was decided by a jury presented with enough facts, having heard arguments from both sides, without need for psychological training. Today this assessment simply doesn’t happen, even if only because usually a jury doesn’t happen.

If a law can be passed that requires proof of criminal intent, then there must be some way that this can be decided. Here we can bring together the wisdom of age with the needs of society, given the huge numbers of older people who are retired but not ready to do nothing. Even without a cadre of people trained for careers based on a new role within the system, many such people would perform this function well based on life experience and training without great expense. The human factor can be restored to the process leaving the legally trained professionals to focus on the law.

One argument typically brought to bear when it is suggested that anyone else be brought in to the system is that it opens up the slippery slope to the privilege of privacy. Given that the public defenders’ role is now reduced to assuming guilt and arguing for reduced sentences rather than for innocence, this becomes something of a moot point. Guilt already seems to be assumed.  And whereas previously it seemed reasonable to argue for protecting the system and its safeguards, now it doesn’t seem reasonable any more. The system has already changed beyond recognition, so why not demand further change?

Why Consciousness Created A Universe

In order to understand the design of the universe, we have to know the ultimate desire of the creator. We will accept that the creator is a being with consciousness, who has desires, and has the intellectual capacity to design a place which enables the eventual fulfillment of this goal. We will also assume that the nature of the original consciousness can be approached by investigation of the creation, therefore we find that the creator must have both masculine and feminine characteristics, and that there is both internal character and external form to this being. The universe itself represents at least part of the external form.

The motivation is one of love, the desire to experience joy and relationship with and through another. However, joy experienced in and through a lesser being would necessarily be a lesser joy, therefore the desire of god is to create other beings as much like god as possible. Thus we find they need to be able to create, not just follow along a predetermined path, and we expect co-creatorship to be a part of the design of the resultant beings. Through beings created in the image of God, then God can have actual experience within the created realm, experience with real consequences and thus deep meaning, unlike experiences solely within the imagination.

Therefore we find the challenge of God in creating is how to make a being who is both other than God and the same as God, who is like God but has become like God through his or her own free choices. Thus the growth from potential to actuality is a necessary part of creation. Time is conceived as the separation between the organism at one stage of development and the organism at a later stage, with the organism being both the same and also more mature. Since we are familiar with growth from childhood to adulthood that is not a hard concept for us.

However, before the concept of growth, it is necessary to distinguish an organism from the collective universal oneness into a separate existence. Thus the concept of space is born as a separation between God and each created being, as well as between the different created beings. In order to create space, however, God must create an arena in which this can all take place, and given that there is nothing outside of God, the way to create something other can be achieved by making a realm that is finite and thus limited,  which then must necessarily exist within God’s own internal being while also being different from God’s internal being.

God would naturally have to be described as infinite dimensional, which we can think of as either filling all possible conceptual infinite-dimensional spaces to infinite extent, or as a single point of zero extension within a potential space of infinite dimensions. To a mathematician it is acceptable to equate these two in some sense.

Thus in creating a universe, God creates something other than himself by creating a realm of finite dimensionality. We observe a universe of three space dimensions plus one time dimension, although our theoretical models today permit of much higher dimensionality. Thus the physical spacetime exists as a subset of the consciousness of God, when we think of consciousness as an extended field that permeates all of reality, and exists as the “ground of our being”, to use a term common in religious circles. Thus space within this conceptual place represents the separation of the organism from the collective, allowing a collective consciousness to be expressed within a finite, four dimensional realm. Thus a human being exists both within God and separate from God.

It is necessary to establish the design in accordance with the desire to give both freedom and direction to the created beings, and indeed to the whole universe. The universe itself is the manifestation of consciousness, existing within and totally dependent upon universal consciousness. However, cocreation demands freedom of choice. There is little value in a being who reaches maturity simply by making predetermined choices and consequently growing in accordance with a pattern. If God wants safety and security, and to avoid pain, then there is no need to go beyond determinism, but if God wants something more than a robotic creation, then God must accept the reality of being actually vulnerable to the choices of her created beings. And God wants as close to other gods as it is possible to make, because great joy requires great investment of heart and love and trust.

However, God’s capacity for self-expression would be severely restricted if the only organisms available were bacteria, and so it is necessary to create a being with the internal mind and external body able to express the depths of heart necessary to manifest joy and external accomplishment through self-actualization. God wants the actual experience of day to day life, of the expression of love between two people, or two gods-made-manifest. Thus there has to be some way for God to guide the process of evolution so that God’s desires and original purpose can be accomplished, while at the same time safe-guarding the free will of the created beings. Both internal and external natures develop through the process of evolution.

Thus the universe is created to respond to desire of the created organisms, from elementary particle to human, because everything participates in universal consciousness by virtue of its very nature. Consciousness here is seen as a field underlying everything, undifferentiated except through the process of tying it down to an existence within the finite dimensional realm.

The physical universe exists as separate “droplets”; even space and time are not infinitely small, but have a smallest extension, a granularity. Physics of the twentieth century discovered this when it looked at the smallest scales, and found the quantum nature of everything. The smallest length and the smallest time are known as the Planck length and time, after Max Planck. Thus reality can be considered to consist of tiny grains. The essential nature of all creation is that of change or growth, not static existence. In accordance with A. N. Whitehead, we can suppose that the whole universe is recreated, or made manifest, at every instant of granular time, so that it is recreated every moment on a different basis, since it recreates itself in accordance with its own nature, which reflects how much movement there has been towards its own growth.

Consciousness within a four dimensional manifold is not fully expressed immediately, but rather this expression develops over time, it grows in manifestation according to the desire of the beings within the created world.  Thus it is both God’s consciousness and becoming God’s consciousness, just as a baby is both being herself and becoming herself.

God has now become totally vulnerable to the lowest expression of consciousness, because there is nothing to pull the elementary particle towards anything higher except for the fact of its own participation within consciousness. If the elementary particle decides to remain solely an elementary particle for all eternity, then that is how God will be forced to remain in his self-manifested form. However, the nature of consciousness is such that God has confidence that sooner or later an elementary particle somewhere will find the desire within to experience more. It will not be a self-reflective thought, it will not be expressed in words, but it will be a felt desire, a wondering in some sense if this is all, an urge towards growth and greater meaning.

We experience the internal nature of the elementary particle as its tendency to behave in an ordered pattern, which we describe as obeying the laws of nature. Obviously this is not the same as the internal nature of an organism, higher or lower, but it is also not nothing.

Now God has designed the world exactly in such a way as to respond to desire, because that is the meaning behind everything in creation. As soon as a particle desires to grow, even the tiniest leaning towards growth, there must be a mechanism to respond. God cannot respond to his own creation from outside of it, since that is how God designed it, to be completely self-determining, and there is no mechanism for an insubstantial being to interact with a substantial being. However, clearly this is of great priority, so in order to respond God had to have created also a world which can reach down to the desire and offer a path whereby such a desire can be substantiated. Even for a particle though, that path is not absolute, it can still choose. Generally choice increases as the organism grows in complexity, but to be consistent we must recognize that even a particle has some element of choice in a response.

Most particles are fine with remaining static, with remaining in their law-like behavior, but there is now one particle that has discovered a desire to allow the greater expression of consciousness, that has found a desire to move towards life, albeit unknowingly of course. Given that the universe recreates itself at every instant of time, at the next instant it is already a different universe, it is on a different foundation. We know from quantum entanglement that once a state has been chosen, determined by the collapse of the wave function into an actual choice of how to substantiate, then this is immediately, instantaneously, communicated to all other particles that have ever been in contact with this particle, which of course at this point we can take to be the whole universe.

Thus the particle aspect of the created being has influenced the internal distributed wave-aspect of reality. This influence then makes it somewhat more likely that other particles will make that same choice, will resonate with the desire for greater internal expression, and given that there has probably been already a very long time of existing as a lower level creation, the universe exists in a state of preparedness, so that it is likely that the desire can spread rapidly and create a sudden discontinuity in the state of matter in the created world. This brings to mind the idea of archetypes within the collective unconscious which affect the thought and behavior of humans, according to the theory of Carl Jung.

Teilhard de Chardin expresses this as a discontinuity in state, leading to the growth of the elementary freedoms in accordance with the growing synthesis of atoms and molecules subtended by growing consciousness. As greater consciousness becomes substantiated, so a greater complexity is manifested within the universe. And this in defined by the choices of the created beings themselves, not dictated by God.

How can a choice be reinforced without taking away from the freedom of choice? How does this differ from God simply dictating the next step?

For this we can look to the idea of morphological fields, as described by Rupert Sheldrake, among others, as a mechanism for the development of shape and behavior of the organism over time. Everything that exists in separated form within creation also participates in the universal oneness underlying it, so the internal nature of everything can be described also mathematically, as scientific fields, like the electromagnetic field, or the gravitational field. Ultimately of course these reflect and participate in the field of consciousness. Thus a change in an organism from one generation to the next is also reflected by a change in the holistic field within which the organism participates. The organism has both “wave and particle” nature, although this needs better vocabulary on the higher end of the evolutionary scale.

Thus, within a field, there exists waves or vibrations that reflect or carry the change that has occurred. Choice begins the change, and substantiation strengthens the change.

Let us suppose that God has some idea of the eventual bodily form of the human, (whether this is the ultimate creation or not), and let us place this idea within the imagination of God. So there is a goal of evolution, there is some teleological aspect of evolution, but free will is preserved  if choice is still honored. There can be no mechanism for direct influence of the physical world, other than through the internal nature of the created beings, so the ultimate goal of the form of the organism must lie in some other realm, which leads us to postulate that there must be a realm which has been variously described by many people throughout history where the ultimate form exists already in perfected state.

We might postulate that the perfect horse is already manifested, along the lines of Plato’s perfect form, but there is no absolute need of this to explain the directed nature of evolution. Each step occurs on the basis of a resonance between the vibrations within the morphological field within the physical world, and vibrations in the corresponding field in the spirit world. However, each step is already completely contained with the ultimate endpoi nt of creation, which we will for now take to be the human. And so if the perfected human form exists within the spiritual substantial creation, there will be vibrations corresponding to every step towards that, at least on the level of morphic development. Every step is seen in the physical world as being on the path towards this external form, but not continuing on to the completed form. Thus everything in existence is patterned after the human form, but is not necessarily going to go all the way to that end.

From this, we can suggest that the reason for the existence of angels is to be that perfected form of the eventual human, or at least to manifest that form so as to set up the vibrations necessary to resonate with the developing organisms within the physical world. This does not conflict with the desire of God to confer freedom of choice, because the spirit world does not exist as the pinnacle of God’s creation, only the ultimate destiny of the matured, or completely manifested, human. It seems likely that each spiritual being has both a physical body, and a spiritual body simultaneously, since the most natural mechanism would be resonance between the two bodies of the same person, while the spiritual body of a person generates a field which resonates with the morphic fields within the spiritual realms.

The spirit world then exists as a lesser manifestation of God, until the human reaches the state of spiritual accomplishment or manifestation that was originally desired when God created. Thus even though humans may be the ultimate pinnacle of creation, there is still a long way to go, because it certainly looks like humans have made some wrong turns along the road of evolution. And of course cocreatorship allows that to happen. At this point, we mostly assume that the angels are higher beings than we are, but ultimately it would seem that we are destined to be greater than the angels in that we will have created ourselves. We will have become manifestations of the nature of divinity by self-creation, as opposed to being created already completed.

Humans like to think of themselves as the final goal of evolution, and there are some reasons to think this might be so, but there is certainly no proof of this. In order to be the pinnacle of creation, then humans would have to demonstrate a divine capacity, which they seem far from demonstrating at this time. However, humans are still evolving. One reason why we might think that humans are the end point is that they have filled the whole space available for them without morphing into two or more species. Generally once species attain their final state, as they expand and experience the same forces of gradual change as before, sooner or later they have split into more than one species.

God incarnate will be gradually be more completely manifested through the process of evolution, and every step will be by free will, from the bottom up. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight, especially since we are only just on the verge of escaping from the earth itself and exploring out into space. We are in fact in a very primitive state, and even most likely in a state very backward from what God might reasonably have expected.

God cannot know the choices that will be made. God chooses self-limitation in her relationship with her children, and God goes through every step of the way, suffering and rejoicing with her children. However, the ultimate fate of these children is to be very like God, and God is confident that ultimately humans will tire of exploring all the negative avenues, and will decide instead to make positive choices.

Religion has been both a vehicle for communicating truth, and a disaster that has created a huge gulf between people and their God. 

The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Politics

Why do right wing leaders always want to tell women how they should be living, particularly with reference to their religion, family roles and sexual activities? Turning this around to what should right wing leaders be doing we find the answer. They should be leading their people into peace, ensuring some measure of fairness and equality in their populations, and generally making things better for their people. Since this is manifestly not what they are doing, they turn to the old reliable mantra, it’s all the women’s fault. After all, if this worked for thousands of years, why shouldn’t it continue working?

To whom does religion belong? Are you allowed to use it to back up your own worldview, or is that going to get you in trouble later with your god? Today, it seems to be up for grabs.

Everybody seems to be using the same tactics. The Israeli right is tied to the most extreme religious males, the haredim, and committed on religious grounds to a policy of settlement which is one of the main blocks to ever securing peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians. The regime of Netanyahu was even just blatantly reelected by the ploys of appealing to racism and fear on the part of the Israeli public. 

Young Muslims in the Middle East these days, blocked from even the means of making a decent living, or having a safe living environment, find themselves drawn to making a Caliphate in order to hasten the Apocalypse. This is their response to governments who have stayed in power through the imposition of almost constant military rule over the last few decades, in line with the control and power hungry leadership class.

America’s Republicans, deeply offended that the country has elected a Democrat to the presidency twice in a row, has vowed as their primary focus to prevent him from doing anything at all. Their outreach to the public, Fox News, warns of the dire consequences of Obamacare, of homosexual marriage, of an agreement with Iran – sure to bring in a nuclear era, they tell us. And back in America, the Republicans are looking everywhere they have any power to turn back the clock on personal freedoms that have been won through hard-fought battles since the sixties. They seize every opportunity to restrict access to abortion, they pass laws that clearly make it easier for people to avoid prosecution for discrimination against homosexuals. While Texas clearly leads the way, the south in particular jumps enthusiastically on the bandwagon.

So as all of these right wing governments unite around a common tactic, to  impose their religious views on people, Israel is torn apart from within over conflict between the orthodox and the more secular, or even just less extremely religious, Jews. The Haredim refuse to do their military service, they force the settlements, they openly disdain both Arabs and secular Jews, slashing tires, enforcing their beliefs and practices on the communities in which they live. And their champion is Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is planning on ruling with a coalition made up of a large contingent of the religious right, so he will of course have to make major concessions to their demands.

ISIS, the current self-declared Caliphate in power over a large region, makes no effort to hide their policies. Kill all dissenters, preferably by gruesome public decapitations to maintain and spread fear, enforce major restrictions against women, force them into prostitution if they are not true believers. Israelis now live in fear of an even more powerful Caliphate, the one they are assured is being built step by step by the Iranians, with the help of Obama and the misguided American left. In this climate of fear, the evil of Netanyahu seems relatively inevitable because he serves as their shield against an even bigger evil.

Fear is the main tactic worldwide. In the US we see a major turn back of freedoms, almost unlimited government supervision in the name of the terror threat,  jails overflowing, those running them getting rich, the people getting poor. Worldwide we see policies that channel wealth to the few at the top, while ensuring that housing and daily living expenses are so burdensome that the vast majority of the population is so exhausted with meeting survival needs that they have no energy left over to organize against their governments’ values.

Women worldwide should be very concerned. Even western nations have a huge amount of restrictions coming from their governments. No woman is going to benefit from a Caliphate, an Orthodox-dominated Israel, or a Republican-controlled US, unless they are happy with a world that narrows the opportunities for their children and mandates all sexual behavior and morals.

At the same time, it is only a minority who really think this way, everyone else is drawn along by the need for staying in power or advancing their careers. Sometimes just by sheer lack of reflection. Several Republican women are forging their careers by being the mouth pieces for their party line. Be careful you don’t lose your soul, ladies! Women who are looking to the Republican party to keep you safe and launch your careers, make sure you are not being used in the short term by people who are seeking to restrict your freedoms in the long term. Who should be deciding your values, you or the government? Who should be telling you right and wrong in how you conduct your relationships? Do not be too ready to cast off the hard-won freedoms that required such battles since the sixties, and for religion, the Pope is a better guide than the Republican party, the president of Turkey or the various Caliphates who show their devotion by the number of beheadings they can authorize.

 

Peace in the Middle East Depends on Women

When I think about a plan for peace, I find myself feeling stuck as to how to find time or a spare army that might be out there, or such practical issues. So clearly that is not the way. Anyway, armies have never worked, they just pit one side against another. What we need then is the changing of the underlying reality for people, changing the way people perceive what is happening, and changing their idea that strong government will resolve the problems for them, and keep them safe. This idea has to go, because right now in the world, governments are maintaining the conflict-based status quo while the vast majority of the people are very ready to let go of conflict and live together peacefully.

Government is self-perpetuated by its hold over people’s fears. It likes to stir up fear, because other than the likelihood of terroristic acts by another people, there is little to live in fear of today. Therefore it is to the advantage of a particular government to emphasize the harm that can be done by a neighbor, and to encourage its people to overlook the possibility that their own policies have caused such a situation where one people wants to harm another.

Netanyahu has governed on this basis for way too long, and has steered Israel into a prolongation of conflict with the Palestinians by portraying every incident as being due to Hamas or some Palestinian action, apparently based on irrational hatred rather than on some real issue. Therefore he has allowed Israel to be lulled into more and more devastation poured on to the Palestinians because they have not wanted peace and justice enough to examine his underlying stance.

This is not Natanyahu’s fault alone at this point, though, it also becomes the responsibility of the Israeli people who have not sought to examine their own beliefs and have not thought to look at themselves as people who are allowing continual harm to be visited on another so that they can be left alone to pursue their own goals. Yes, safety is a valid goal, but every society has to ask how it wants to live within the world as it is, and every society has to choose whether to take risks towards peace, or whether to maintain the status quo. Israeli people must ask themselves the question, are we now partly to blame for allowing the continuation of the suffering which the Palestinians currently endure?  Could we do better? Are our goals commensurate with our identity as God’s Chosen People? And the religious people can think deeply about their own identity as a people, about the unfolding of God’s providence throughout history, and about exactly what kind of society that is going to bring about. 

Most of all, they can think in the light of the very different role of women today, the role of an empowered woman within Judaism. Already there are women rabbis in  Reformed and Conservative Judaism. Jewish people generally do not have much to say against the inclusion of women in power, usually an objection to this is reserved for the Orthodox. So given the vast range of differences within Judaism, including the secular Jews, there has already been much change and development.

Therefore at this point, such concerns must be raised in order to look at what sort of society Israel must become if the current situation is allowed to fester unresolved for much longer. It cannot be a Jewish state, at least not one that has much connection to providence as it has been seen over thousands of years.

To provoke this, Netanyahyu’s actions must be seen in context of power-seeking at the expense of  the manifestation of the true Judaic longing, the longing for the realization of a just and righteous nation that fulfills the hope of God.

This is a feminine way to proceed, to seek the underlying change and to change the underlying perception, to allow for the realization of one’s own imperfections and for the realization that one’s own inaction has led to an unjust and imperfect result, without self-judgment or recrimination, but with a resolution to be different. And in this case, there must be self-reflection of women, already apparent in many ways in Israel, in the presence of young women in Herzog’s team, even in leadership, in the actions over time of the older women who seek to oversee the treatment of Palestinians at the checkpoints, and in the establishment of joint Arab-Jewish schools, etc.

This self-reflection must be brought to a national level very quickly, and Netanyahu’s arrogant overstepping of his role in the world by choosing confrontation with the Obama administration offers an opportunity. Today there are many Israelis who already doubt his choices. Israel is not made more secure by Netanyahu's seeking of a relationship with the US Congress behind the back of the President.

Beyond Israel’s problems of conflict with the Palestinians there is also the whole issue of economic and social reality. The average Israeli is becoming poorer in real terms, just like the average American actually, and the reason should be shown up for what it is, the stirring up of conflicts in order to maintain governments in power, and the consequent diverting or resources towards military purposes. Herzog maybe should have emphasized this in his speeches, and pointed out how much danger militarization over the last few years has engendered in the Middle East. The danger is clearly linked with fear-mongering policies of Netanyahu’s government, and the people who are allowing this development, people within the government, must be shown to be supporting it for their own purposes of power and control over others.

But underlying all of this, the real issue is that of women not playing a true role in their societies. America can lead on this, because American women are facing real threats to their own freedom and equality here at home. Every time a Texas state leader gets to his feet to make a speech, another bomb is thrown into the ring to challenge women’s rights, and to turn back the clock on their progress. It would be very good if women can organize here in the US just as they did in the sixties, and get out there on the streets in huge numbers. It would create a great momentum throughout the world, and empower women in countries where their problems are much greater, like India for example. Facebook, Twitter, social media, can actually make this happen if there is enough resolve on the part of a few women.

Even deeper than this, it is time to seriously challenge the worldview of the monotheistic religions on the basis of science itself, and to come to a worldview that can recognize that God is both feminine and masculine. To express the heart of Mother God, and to come up with an explanation of why Mother God has been unable to intervene in the fate of women in history, would be a very productive avenue to explore.

I think we need a serious reexamination of the reality of messianic thinking in light of the yearning of Mother God, even in such obviously male-dominated religions as are expressed in ISIS and in excessively Orthodox Judaism – not that I mean to equate these, in general Judaism has been a non-violent arena, with all violence confined to that done to the original nature of women, starting with Hagar and most likely Abraham's sister/wife, Sarah.

The legal rights of women is probably the path for change in countries such as India, Afghanistan, etc, and this involves the general uprising of women in those countries, with the support of the UN women’s movement, and such international organizations. Once there has been a statement that change is necessary and desirable, such as will happen in the Israeli election, and has happened in the Arab Spring, even happened here in America when the people had the audacity to elect a black person to the presidency, then there will be a much greater empowerment of the path to change worldwide. Israel has always seen itself as central because of its central role in the "providence of God" over so many millennia.

Maybe the biggest danger to the future today is that of planetary destruction of the environment, and this is an issue where women are making real inroads into government today, such as in the Green Party in England and other European countries. Governments must be shown up for their shallow short term profit focus that is destroying hope for the future. This must be emphasized because it deals with the next generation, an issue which has hardly been mentioned by governments who focus solely on their own power. We must stop journalists and TV reported from reporting how decisions are made on the basis of the likely influence on reelection as though it were a valid concern. It must be reported as a shameful concern.

There are so many issues on which women could make progress and be shown to be trustworthy guardians of the safety of a society, especially over the long term. As the perennial flashpoint for so many of the world's disturbances today, let's hope Israel can see its way to testing out the path of peace, rather than continually opting for the reelection of the leader who speaks loudest of the necessity for permanent fear.