A Time for Choices

"The age of the leaders has come and gone. Every person must be their own leader now. You must remove your projection, and contain the spirit of our time in your own life and your own nature, because to go the old way and follow your leader is a form of psychological imprisonment."Those words are from the late Sir Laurens van der Post, statesman, military leader, philosopher, and native born South African.This is an extraordinary time. The tragic events of September 11, 2001, have propelled us all into a new cycle of our personal, national, and global lives. It will never be the same. There is no "normal" to get back to. Life is in this country has changed forever, and it seems clear that we have entered an era in which new questions need to be asked, because there are no easy answers or quick fixes.Our relationship to the "other" needs to be re-examined. Is it "us and them"? Or is it just us here on the same planet together? This is the territory we explore in this program, with guests Terry Tempest Williams, author of Passion and Patience in the Desert; Harlan Cleveland, who served as assistant secretary of state and U.S. Ambassador to NATO, as well as the first dean of the Hubert Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, a recipient of the U.S. Medal of Freedom, and the author of Birth of a New World; Marianne Williamson, minister and author of The Healing of America; Sharif Abdullah, director of the Common Way Institute and author of Creating a World that Works for All; Robert Fuller, a physicist, former president of Oberlin College, and author of Breaking With All Due Respect; and Thomas Gumbleton, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Detroit.