For most progressives, what happens in families is a matter of "just" women's issues and children's issues. So progressive movements have focused primarily on dismantling the top of the dominator pyramid (politics and economics) and left its foundations (domination in family, gender, and other intimate relations) in place.

I pray for a world where we live in partnership rather than domination; where "man's conquest of nature" is recognized as suicidal and sacrilegious; where power is no longer equated with the blade, but with the holy chalice: the ancient symbol of the power to give, nurture, enhance life. And I not only pray, but actively work, for the day when it will be so.

Difference is not equated with superiority or inferiority, dominating or being dominated, being served or serving.

Marshall Rosenberg has a genius for developing and teaching practical skills urgently needed for a less violent, more caring world.

The bad news is that the movement toward the partnership side of the social scale (and it is always a matter of degree, as no society is a pure partnership or domination system) has been fiercely resisted and countered by periodic regressions. So domination systems have rebuilt themselves in different forms - be they secular or religious, eastern or western, leftist or rightist.

This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman...is what ultimately lies behind man's famous "conquest of nature" - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own.

In our age of nuclear and biological weapons and the ever more efficient exploitation of nature, the mix of high technology and an ethos of domination could take us to an evolutionary dead end.