8/15/2021

My Dear Friend & POTUS, JRB,

            “These are the times that try men's souls” as Thomas Paine wrote in 1776. That’s what came to mind while I sat on my Zoom call with Yangon Friends. Today we had 14 little boxes on the screen including folks from Singapore, England, Korea, India, New Zealand & the US. We pondered the reactions of the younger & older generations to the upheavals in Afghanistan & Myanmar. We wondered what we can do. We contemplated the nature of change & whether technological innovation, such as Bitcoin, might be a vehicle toward democratization. One Friend concluded that peace will come from within. We each have to seek inner harmony which will radiate outward.

            Another Friend shared an article from “Greater Good Magazine, “What Can We Learn from the World’s Most Peaceful Societies?” You should check it out. Using a machine learning technique called Random Forest, they discovered that the single most important contributor to peace is non-warring norms. I need to read more about what that entails. They also said that peace requires visionary leadership. I think you are trying to offer that. Word lexicons matter as well. So having common discourse with peaceful lingo helps folks stay calm. They do this in Costa Rica by saying, “Pura Vida,” all the time. It means pure life, but is more like the expression, “it’s all good,” which my daughter uses. Maybe we should say that more often.  We could also sing the lyrics that Alice Wine popularized in the 1960s, “we need to keep our eyes on the prize.”

            BYBS,