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I've been heartbroken at the violence in our world lately, of how people describe perpetrators of violence as having no "soul" in their eyes, and of what in my mind links people like Slobodan Milosevic and the students who blast away at fellow students.

I think it is an issue of control, and people are going to extreme lengths to restructure the world in their image of it. Reshaping the world through killing the opposition. Hate crimes. We see this everywhere in our society-from these horrifying stories in our nightly news to the "entertainment" we are offered on television to the simpler and more personal times we ourselves shut someone up by ostricizing them. We have seen violence perpetrated on blacks, gays and women, and we have amassed votes to stifle the opposition.

The pain and long-term wounds of such reshaping the world with violence fills all of us. None of us is "recovered" from the Holocaust or from the US internment of Japanese during the second world war. None can recover from the Oklahoma City tragedy or the school shootings. It inevitably is part of the fabric of our spirits.

It's time to quit reshaping the world through violence, to really become a civilized society-and people over 60 are in a wonderful position to lead the way! Come forward. Help the rest of the world develop co-creative power for solutions instead of power over others. Help us all find power within to reach out, to find the words, to listen to that which we think is "the other."

It's time to restructure the world through peaceful means-by creating systems big-hearted enough to hold the world's diversity.

One-time article Copyright 1999 by Humboldt Senior Resource Center.