What truth moves behind, beneath our gathering "No"? Our no to escalation, no to Mr. Bush's denial and duplicity? The surge of "YES!"

This yes speaks to our shared humanity, cries yes to an evolution, a revolution, a transformation of our vision beyond the illusion of our separateness, beyond the inherent lie in the numbing repetition of the label "enemy" - beyond war.

The work of Marshall Rosenberg, a language called Non Violent Communication (NVC), is premised upon the understanding that the needs of the individual are linked to the needs of the collective, and points to the view that needs are, in fact, universal, shared by the human family. NVC teaches that behind each "no" lives a "yes" to meeting another need, more central, more "alive" in the moment.

What is alive, most alive in this moment of planet time is the reality, the pre-eminent actuality of the crisis of human-caused climate change and its attendant rippling effects upon security, species diversity and survival. Rumbling beneath our no to escalation of the criminal obscenity that is the US-created catastrophe in Iraq, is a yes that can be heard erupting around the world, from each one of us at once. Together we are recognizing, through floods, hurricanes and record temperatures, that something is "up" and upside down, and we are waking up.

Our yes affirms a world model that invites dialogue and co-operation, that rallies our combined energies toward the global challenge, commonly held. When we say yes, we recognize the tragedy and failure and waste of war. Our yes is to taking off the blinders and acknowledging that war gobbles wantonly at our shared resources, poisons our planet home, and spends, expends, our treasure - the intelligence, will, creativity and life blood of young American men and women and of all those they are consigned to kill and destroy "on the other side of the world." (W - January 10, 2007.)

"Yes" attests to our readiness to surrender the tortuous delusion that has brought us to this precipice. As Albert Einstein expressed, it is "our experience of ourselves . as something separate from the rest [that is] - a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

As we take to the streets in Washington DC, across the country and around the world this weekend, we intone yes to a world where we recognize our every effort as an attempt to meet our needs, and each his or her needs. We sing yes to our commitment to awaken to the essential nature of our humanity, to see ourselves in each other and to live our lives as members of the human family, and of the earth community. The chorus is growing. Yes to one world, where the needs of the many are met.

Meg O'Shaughnessy (peacespeak@yahoo.com) works with young learners in San Francisco and is a student of Non-Violent Communication. www.cnvc.org.

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