I just finished reading Anodea Judith's book, Waking the Global Heart. 

Anodea takes you on an amazing journey through the last 100,000 years of our evolution and growth on this planet. She explores the advances and backslides, the growth spurts and collapses that have brought us to this progressing but confusing era of history. 

She deeply and beautifully demonstrates how our historical growth has followed much the same growth cycle that is typical of a young human, evolving from  birth and dependency through the terrible two's, etc till we find ourselves now in late adolescence, culturally, trying to find our way to adulthood without a roadmap.

As with her earlier and most excellent book  Wheels of Life, Anodea finds the cycle in our existence and finds us advancing along like clockwork. Only now the clock is ticking faster than ever before, and like a fast paced action movie where the hero has to figure out which wire to cut as those last few seconds are ticking away on the easily readable LED display, we now find ourselves faced with the same three choices: right action, wrong action and inaction. Unfortunately it's not even remotely as simple as picking which wire to cut and the LED display is anything but readable.

What will we do? Hopefully we will grow up. Start relating to one another adult to adult, peer to peer, heart to heart rather than Superior to Inferior, God to man, Father to daughter. Instead of looking for the wire to cut, look for the connection to make. In fact make all the connections you can and make them from the heart.

GENDER REVOLUTION LEGALIZED

Sweden has been a pioneer in bringing gender balance into government. 
Forty-five percent of its parliament is female.

Other nations have finally begun to follow its lead. In 2003, the Welsh 
assembly became the first legislative body in history to have as many 
women as men. Meanwhile, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, the 
Netherlands, Germany, Argentina, Costa Rica, South Africa, and 
Mozambique have at least 30 percent of their parliamentary seats filled 
by women, largely due to legally mandated quotas.

Rwanda's new constitution calls for 30 percent of decision-making 
positions to be held by women. In the parliamentary elections of 2003, 
that quota was exceeded, as women captured 49 percent of the 
legislative seats.

The corporate domain is proceeding toward equality more slowly. Norway 
is the first and only nation to pass laws mandating female representation 
on corporate boards, requiring a 40 percent quota.