Dealing With Sociopolitical World Changes

Congratulations to The Times on its recent special report on “Seeking a New World” (World Report, Dec. 11 and 18), and which to me was the most significant series in my more than 30 years’ readership of your paper.

While President Bush recently called for a “new world order,” since his “read my lips” reversal, I find it most difficult to accept his new world order pronouncement as anything more than rhetoric, as was also Ronald Reagan’s “a new beginning” statement of a few years ago.

In the epilogue of the special report, Paul Nitze is quoted as stating, “We need a strategic concept, and we aren’t hearing one.” There is no denying that one of the greatest needs in today’s world is for the development and availability of a realistic global strategy to bring forth a new and better world order.

The fact of the matter is that such a strategy does exist and is available now. I refer to the New Reality Education program as developed by the International Center for Advanced Study. Its purpose is to encourage and develop that higher level of awareness of modern world realities, and without which there can be no significant improvement in the overall human condition.

The trouble is that to too great an extent the leadership in both this country and abroad, in terms of global awareness realities, has been looking but not seeing, listening but not hearing, reading and observing but not comprehending. What this has bred is not leadership but mis-leadership; not opportunities won but opportunities lost.

In view of all this, has not the time come to face up to the realities involved in the building and achieving of a new and better world order? If not for ourselves, then at least for the sake of our children and future generations?

L.P. GOULD

Los Angeles