"The new century with its hoped-for Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence seems to be crumbling around us. But this is not a time for despair. It is a time for new learnings about the complexity of peace building in a world alive with diversity. We have not understood the structural, cultural and spiritual difficulties of our task. Particularly, we have not understood the emerging three-fold citizenship required of us in the 21^st century: (1) faithfulness to our country, (2) faithfulness to the new requirements of citizenship in the United Nations for all six billion of us, and (3) faithfulness to another kind of citizenship entirely – in the kingdom of heaven, which we share with all creation. Each of our three citizenships is intertwined with the other two.  What shall our practice be?"

-- by Dr. Elise Boulding, an eminent US peace educator of the past 50 years. See her recent book, CULTURES OF PEACE: THE HIDDEN SIDE OF HISTORY.

For the world to survive in this time of unprecedented global peril, we must cultivate three senses of patriotism, which are represented below by the flags we should be flying and pledges we should be saying with our hearts and hands as well as our head.