We Need Win-Win Commitments To Achieve And Preserve InterGroup Peace In America

 

We have deep-seated intergroup anger in many settings in America.

We have groups of people in a number of settings who feel a sense of having been damaged by other groups of people.

The InterGroup issues that exist between groups of people in America are real and they are measurable.

We have significant disparities in multiple areas of care delivery. Ending Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Health Care Disparities in America deals with many of those issues.

We also have major and ongoing intergroup disparities in both education levels and economic status that show we have not achieved full equality in key areas, for all of our people.

The learning gaps for groups of students in some of our schools are major and those gaps are growing in too many settings.   

We also have more people in prison than any country in the world by a wide margin — and a significantly disproportionate number of the people in our prisons are from our minority populations. Our prison population realities alone prove that we have not managed to bring all Americans equally into full inclusion in the American Dream.

We have major room for improvement in a wide range of intergroup areas.

We clearly do have the opportunity to improve. We need to make improving in those areas of significant disparities a top priority for our country, so that we can have a future of Peace and prosperity, and not find ourselves in a country with widening divisions and growing intergroup anger that will damage the future for us all.

At our very best levels as a nation, we are the hope and the light of the world.

In our most enlightened values and our most ethical sets of behaviors, we do the right things for the right reasons and we achieve extremely successful results.

Our core national beliefs in democracy, freedom, equality, equity, justice, and opportunity push us toward some of the very best life possibilities and most positive realities and outcomes on the planet for our people. 

We have come a very long way.

We began our national history with a stunning and painful level of ethical and functional bi-polarity — enabling, supporting, empowering and encouraging one set of people in our country while we were simultaneously enslaving, and very intentionally doing damage at multiple intergroup levels to other sets of people.

We have made major positive changes in some key and important areas since those founding days as a nation.

Slavery has ended. The cruel, divisive, and intentionally damaging Jim Crow laws that followed slavery are no longer the law of the land. Other sets of laws that explicitly discriminated against other ethnic and racial groups, and against women, have been repealed and replaced with laws that are very directly and explicitly intended to encourage and support inclusion, equity, and opportunity. 

We now try to achieve, encourage and support much more enlightened and positive levels of intergroup reality with our laws.

Our laws now attempt to explicitly include all of us in the full protection of the laws. Our clear legal intention today is to include us all in the full opportunity to participate in the American Dream.

We are in a better place in many ways than we have ever been before. That gives us a chance to do even better. We need to build on the best components of where we are now. We need to move forward together to be all that we can be as a nation that is fully at Peace with itself, and working very directly to create win-win outcomes for all of the people who make up the American “Us.”

Knowledge is power. We need to understand today what caused us to do all of the negative intergroup things we have done in the past. We need to move forward to put that negative history behind us. We need to create a new reality that gives us all the positive opportunities that we deserve to have as part of who we collectively now are.

We need to be an American “Us,” instead of being divided as a nation into us and them by race, ethnicity, and our various cultural legacies. We need to be united by our shared beliefs, and we need to be mutually aligned by the values we collectively support and share.

We can do that. We need to do that overall at a macro level — as an American “Us.” We need to do that work to become an “Us” in each situation and each setting where we come together.

We need to build Peace in each setting, piece by piece.

We need to be an “Us” in each setting. We also need to be very sure — as a top priority objective — that no one in each setting is a “Them.”

We need to avoid having anyone perceived in instinct triggering ways to be “Them” in any situations or settings, in order to achieve and maintain intergroup Peace in each setting.

We need to be aligned by our beliefs and by our values as an American “Us.”

The InterGroup interaction books describe a dozen core beliefs that anchor our values and our ethical underpinnings relative to our beliefs and our behaviors today. We need to be very explicit about those shared beliefs so that they can function to bring us together and keep us together as a nation, and as a people.

Win-win commitments need to anchor that whole process.

We need to believe in, and commit to win-win outcomes in every setting. We need to very clearly and very intentionally support each other in achieving our key goals in each situation and every setting. When we are truly committed to Win-Win outcomes to our core, then our intergroup interactions are based on goals that make us all better and stronger in what we believe and do.

We need to start the win-win process with our children — making sure that every child in every setting gets the key support they need in their first months and first years of life, to build brain strength and to create emotional security.

We can make that support for our children a key commitment from each of us to all of us — and we can do the things we need to do as teams to help every child in every setting.

We need to support our schools and we need to make sure every child gets the education that gives every child the best chance to succeed.

We also need our communities to support our collective health. We need a world where we can all get the best care, and we need to work together to improve our individual and collective health. As win-win commitments that we make to each other, we need healthy activity levels, and we need healthy eating to be foundational opportunities for each of us in every setting.

We need our communities to be at Peace with themselves. Trust needs to anchor the local Peace process. We need police departments and we need court systems and judicial processes that are fair, equitable, supportive, and trusted.

We need police who are trusted by the communities they serve because the police do, in fact, serve those communities and because they have earned that trust. We need each community to very intentionally function as an “Us.” We need to have that perception of being “Us” as a tool to anchor our behaviors and to give us the benefits and the value that can result in any setting from being perceived to be “Us.”  

We need those values to drive our interactions and we need them to help us achieve win-win results for each group in each setting.

We can be great as a country. We can continue to be great for a very long time when we include everyone in the American Dream, because that inclusion level for us all in that Dream can make us stronger, safer, more effective, more successful, and more functional in every setting.

That particular rising tide can lift all ships. We can make the tide rise by including everyone in the American Dream.

The four InterGroup books explain how our instinctive behaviors tend to shape and run our lives. Those books explain how our cultures tend to function as servants and as tools of our instincts in each setting to help our instincts achieve their goals.

The four InterGroup books explain how we can have our intellect, our values and our belief systems structure our cultures and channel our instincts to achieve the enlightened values, behaviors, and beliefs that can give us all positive personal opportunities and ongoing InterGroup prosperity and Peace.

We will not achieve those win-win results and develop the needed levels of intergroup trust by simply wishing that they would happen. Wishful thinking, magical thinking, and unstructured and unfocused good intentions and sincere, but generic best wishes will not get us to the intergroup outcomes that we really want and need to achieve in each setting.

Peace In America can happen if we do the right things in open, honest, well intentioned, and well-structured ways to make it happen.

The InterGroup books are written to help people figure out what that behavior that creates those outcomes and those interactions can be in each setting.

The messages are included in each of the books. The Headlines for Peace can be found in every book:

Peace in Our Time.

Peace, piece by piece.

Win-win for us all in each and every setting. 

All brought together by the values we share.  

Candor, transparency, honesty, clarity, extreme insight, and good intentions to the core.

“Us” everywhere. 

We need to commit together to a very real Peace Movement to make that whole process happen, and to make those headlines functional guidance factors for our lives.

The next Peace Thought on this website explains why we need to anchor this whole agenda with a true Movement For Peace. The Peace Thoughts function as little teaching tools for the books and help build the intergroup interaction mental model, and tool kit.